


In Hadal Depths

by limitedpractice



Category: Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Horror, Merformers, Mermaids, NSFW, Ocean Horror, Ocean Sex, Oral Sex, Robot/Human Relationships, Robots, or the result of outside influences, the type of dubcon where the reader doesn't know how many of her actions are down to free will, when you're so far below the surface of the world how deep can you trust your judgement?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-02 09:19:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23848834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/limitedpractice/pseuds/limitedpractice
Summary: The Hadal Zone begins on the ocean floor and ends at the limit of humanity’s imagination. It occupies the depth between trenches that Earth’s moving tectonic plates have pried open and ends in a place where life was once thought impossible.Maybe the Hadal Zone was named after the realm of the unsalvageable dead for good reason, and what floats in a relentless absence of light should be left alone. You should not try to seek it out. You should not try to explain it. You should not yearn for it.You shouldn’t have gone swimming alone in a moonlit cove that night, but you did.And now he’s seen you.And marked you.And the water isn’t ever going to leave you alone.
Relationships: Starscream/Reader, Starscream/you
Comments: 87
Kudos: 222





	1. Epipelagic [the sunlight zone]

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CyanideOreos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanideOreos/gifts).



> Merformers! My first time writing this universe turned into something much longer than planned. But I love writing in the style this story is in, with lots of abstract descriptions and minimal dialogue. 
> 
> This story wouldn’t have been written at all if not for talking with shapeofmetal about the art she drew and the words to go along with it. Look at the art below and how good Starscream looks! Those colours! He’s like a midnight bruise that doesn’t hurt. IT’S PERFECT  
> All my thanks again for talking about this with me and for your ideas/suggestions/improvements. It was a lot of fun!
> 
> [Link to the original post with amazing art and words in it](https://shapeofmetal.tumblr.com/post/189223464909/you-had-heard-this-little-deserted-cove-was)
> 
> Although the first few chapters aren’t explicit, they do have a dubcon flavour to them. The later chapters have a greater flavour, and are a lot more explicit. Don’t read on if you don’t want to arrive at a place where creepy ocean sex happens.
> 
> The first 239 words of this story are shapeofmetal’s. Then the words after the line break starting with ‘The shadow behind you…’ are mine. 
> 
> Chapter titles are named after the zones of the ocean in descending depths.

You had heard this little deserted cove was perfect for late night swimming and it had been. The moon wasn’t full but despite that it was still bright and it shone through the clouds illuminating the surface of the dark water like a mirror.

You had grown more comfortable in the warm water and had started singing an old disney song that felt right to sing while the moon glittered on the surface of the rippling water.

Then the other voice had synchronized with yours.

It was deep, definitely masculine and there had been something eerie about it. Something about it echoed wrong. Like the voice was both very close and far away at the same time, echoing back on itself.

Of course you immediately stopped and turned around but the voice was gone.

Had it really happened? It might have just been in your head but-

“Is someone there?”

You were still turning in the water trying to see if anyone was behind you and you were about to let out a breath, it seems like it was in your head after all.

Of course there wasn’t anyone-

“Didn’t anyone warn you there are sharks out here?"

-and ice slid down your spine because while you had looked all around on the surface of the water, it dawned on you that you hadn’t looked below the reflected surface of the ocean.

Something blotted out the moonlight behind you.

_________

The shadow behind you moves like a slick of oil upon cursed glass.

It passes around you and in front of you as if it was a living thing, melding with the water as if it’s one and the same and then it’s smiling.

Below the surface layer of the gentle breeze that’s caressing the cove and everything in it, there is a hidden frequency. It’s a sibling of the water and the shadows that surrounds you, but this one is in your ear. It’s a low thrum of humour that’s bubbled up to breach the surface and it’s just so glad to have finally met you.

“Keep your eyes open,” it tells you in a liquid whisper. “Even if you only have two of them.”

And then a light switch flicks on, and the moonlight returns in a burst of blinding white light and the shadow-voice-water thing vanishes out of existence.

“What?” You blurt out the first thing that comes to mind. “What did you say? I… is- is someone there..?”

Gentle waves lap against your chest. An unseen bird chirps from a distant treetop. No-one answers you. There is no-one there. You let out your breath that you’ve been holding, and the slow breeze winds through your hair in a caress you might mistake for indulgent pity.

But you don’t mistake it for that, because the only mistake you’ve made is to think there was someone behind you when there’s not. There’s obviously not. You turn around in the water slowly, not out of fear of course but out of defiance towards yourself. This is proof that you’re not scared and that you’re in control here and you can move however you like in this water.

The ripples your rotations make in the water are small but insistent, and are so perfectly formed they seem unworldly. They don’t spread out far from you.

You look out across the water to the hidden horizon, and for the first time in your life you feel alone in the water. You feel exposed. You feel like your subconscious is screaming at you with a gagged and bloodied mouth. There is a wonderful alien stillness to the world. The air feels thick. It feels alive.

Your mind shudders free of the cloak that’s been placed on it, and it rasps at you that you have to leave. You have to get out of the water now. Right now. Right now you have to leave before it’s too late and he comes back to get you and you have to go go go and there’s an invisible punch to your chest and electric current in your stomach.

Your survival instincts take charge and you swim fast and hard towards the shore. The ripples you create from your splashing and kicking don’t spread out far from you.

You stride back onto dry land and up the beach and don’t stop walking until you’re a safe distance away from the water’s edge. Now that you’re on dry land you feel safer, and since you feel safer you’re feeling bolder, which gives you the backbone and the curiosity to stand up straight and look back at the area of water you were just in.

Moonlight illuminates it gently. You glance up at the fat moon hanging overhead and the wispy clouds now dotted around it, and you know that was all you saw. A cloud had passed over your light source and that was the oily looking shadow you saw. And you’d been singing a song from a film about a lost fish that needs to be found and there are shark characters in it and that’s why you’d thought about sharks and warnings and eyes and- and a combination of the film you’d been thinking about and the sensible words of advice you’ve heard in many iterations over many different years - don’t swim alone, don’t swim at night, don’t swim where predators watch and wait and play - had created a voice in your head that had spoken a warning to you.

“Didn’t anyone warn you there are sharks out here?"

Just because that voice didn’t sound like yours didn’t mean it wasn’t yours. It may have been masculine with a slight edge of humour and a thick angle of remorseless hunger to it, but you often sang in different accents and tones so it must have been yours.

And just because those words had sounded like they were coming from behind you, as if someone had curled their lips up in perfect parallel to your ear, doesn’t mean there was anyone there. Your hair was wet and loose and covering your ears, which would have distorted any sounds no matter where they came from.

There was also a strong breeze blowing into your face, which would have blown any sounds behind you. Except that the breeze was...gentle. You remember is caressing you, not striking you. Maybe the breeze was stronger than you thought it was, and it was behind you and blowing into your back. Yes, that makes more sense. The wind was blowing your words behind and around you and your ears were covered by your hair and were full of water from swimming and…

...and was the wind really blowing? Yes, it must have been. And...

...did you even break the surface of the water? Yes, of course you did. You remember submerging your head at least once as you were swimming.

…

Didn’t you?

You slowly reach a hand up to touch your hair. It comes back dry.

You swallow, and your heart picks up speed. The strong wind must have dried it. The wind that was now a gale and not a breeze.

The air around you is still now. It is heavy. It’s becoming infected with humidity the longer you stand here. Water is trickling down your slowly drying skin and you wish it was sea water from your hair but you know it’s sweat from every pore your body owns.

You look back at the small patch of water you were in.

The never ending ripples in the water are hypnotising.

Your throat gets dryer and your heart works harder and why is the water still rippling? Why is the surface still churning? Was it from you swimming away from it? Or is there something unseen underneath it? Why hasn’t it stopped, and what could it be, and why are you still looking and why is everything so hot and why are you-

Something blots out the moonlight in front of you.

You scream and step back quickly and stumble and almost trip and your eyes fly wide open but they’re blind you’re blind and you can’t see anything. You brush the hair out of your eyes so fast and so hard that you hurt yourself and you let out a laugh that would make your mother cry because that’s all it was - your hair was in front of your eyes and now it’s gone and you can see again.

You hold your hair back with one hand and look at the beach and the ocean bathed in moonlight and breathe and breathe and breathe and breathe and those ripples in the water out there just look so pretty. They look so wonderfully inviting, and maybe you should look at them for a little bit longer. Just a little bit longer, to try and understand what they are.

The ripples widen. They begin to churn faster. They start to spread towards the shore.

With an effort that shouldn’t be so great, you tear your face away. You turn around and walk stiffly back to your car. Your muscles are rigid and you’re so tense you feel like they could snap and break and your neck, your cold exposed neck, is screaming at you in conjunction with your heart and legs and spine but you ignore them and do not run. You do not increase your speed and absolutely do not run.

Sudden movements trigger predators, and you don’t know which one is watching you in the dark.

You don’t know where he is.

You make it to your car and turn on the ignition and slowly drive away. The tires crunch over the gravel path, and you fight the overwhelming compulsion to turn on your full beam headlights and to lock every door. Light could attract it and if it attacks you - if it slithers up from the bathypelagic and breaks the surface of the water that’s running in parallel to your slowly moving car and leaps the distance and snarls and smashes the glass - you want your escape route to be clear.

You drive along the coast of the biggest ocean on the planet and watch the cove in your mirrors until it’s hidden by trees and overlapping rocks. You drive on, and keep its position fixed in your mind relative to wherever else you are on the surface. Your corrupted North Star is behind you, drowning but still alive. It treads water as it waits for you.

\----

That night you dream of sand.

You dream of barren rock and deserts and dry cracks in the Earth’s skin and wake up slowly, like you’ve surfaced from a great depth and have finally breached the surface. Your body’s drenched in sweat and there’s salted water in your eyes.

The water doesn’t leave you.

It escapes in degrees and is then replenished. You can sweat and cry all you like but you can’t escape it. Your species was forged in the water and you’ve adapted to living on dry land and have made your home here, but it’s not where you came from. Not really. It’s not your true ancestral home, and sometimes it calls to you. Sometimes it pleads with you.

Sometimes it tricks you.

The never ending ripples of invisible water leak into your mind and settle and swirl and diffuse and you know that the human body is made up of sixty percent water, but it’s feeling uncomfortably like yours is now sixty seven.

Something has settled in your head. It’s behind your eyes and in your ears and it smells of salt and gold and that doesn’t make sense but you know it to be true. It’s something raw and valuable, and you don’t know how much it’s worth. Not yet you don’t.

What isn’t true – what can’t possibly have happened – is that someone was behind you in the water. Their warm chest was not in close parallel to your back, and they didn’t ask you a question they knew you didn’t have the correct answer to. It didn’t happen. It can’t have happened. It doesn’t make sense and there was no-one there and you’re not going to think about it anymore because it’s stupid and you’re not stupid, you’re normal and educated and have a functioning brain that can explain away any unexpected occurrences with a cold clear logic and you have better things to do with your time and you will not, absolutely will not, go back to that beach again. You do not need to. There are other coves and lagoons to explore, and that’s where you’ll go next. That’s where you’ll focus your efforts and enjoy your time and you don’t need to think about this any more.

The next night you dream of a dried up ocean.

The sea bed is like the surface of a deep space planet, rough and sharp and scarred and you see where he lives. You see where he emerges from. At the apex of a puncture wound into the Earth’s core, in the crushing depths of the Hadal Zone devoid of all colour, an outline of red lights blink invitingly in the void.

If you were to descend further into that light, if you could equalize your pressure and conserve the recirculated air of your diving suit, you would see the lights soften and widen to form the entrance of a tunnel. And if you were to dive down further, further than your species was ever meant to go, you would see a small hidden cave speckled in different lights. And you know that he would not be waiting for you there, because he’d already be with you. He’d have taken you there.

The next night you return to the beach.

And you do so because you want to, not because you have to. It’s ridiculous to be scared of something that’s not dangerous and contains no threats to you, so you’re going to visit it one more time. A small section of your primal lizard brain is screaming that you will kill yourself, but since what it’s trying to say is incorrect you don’t need to pay attention to you. But you do need to quieten it. You do need it to stop. It is unceasingly there, a core deep thrumming in your head that’s telling you things you don’t want to acknowledge and whatever it actually is, whatever’s settled down into your head, is not tugging or urging or dragging you back to the ocean, because that would imply there's at least a semblance of resistance involved and there's not. You know that you’re not being pulled back to the beach.

You know that you're being guided.

Your blood has been seasoned with salt and brine and you want to know why. It’s diffusing throughout your cells and you think, you hope, you expect, to find a rational explanation of why you feel the way you do, and the only way to get this closure is to go back to the source of where it began.

You drive along a deserted highway beneath a moon that’s growing brighter. Your heart is beating steadily, just a little bit faster than usual and that’s because of trepidation at being alone at night regardless of the situation, not because of anticipation at the thought of sinking back into the water and meeting him again.

You probably tasted some tainted water when you were singing out loud the other night, even though you were stationary and the water was as still as glass. You probably swallowed some water while you were swimming, even though you never once submerged your head below the surface. You probably inhaled some toxic gases from a passing ship, even though the cove is hidden and miles away from the nearest shipping lane.

You return to the beach and park your car, and carefully climb over the rocks and sand and ditches that form the secret path down to the cove.

Everything is still. Everything is silent.

Your heart is beating faster and your mouth is dry, and it takes only seconds to remove your clothes and fold them into a neat pile and put them on a flat rock. You’re already wearing your costume, and you walk towards the lapping water immediately. It’s best to get this over and done with, because then maybe you’ll get some peace. Maybe you’ll have peaceful sleep tonight if you can prove to yourself that there’s no-one out here but yourself.

You walk, then wade, then swim out to the spot you were last time and you do so effortlessly. You don’t know how you picked out his longitude and latitude so precisely, but you have a good memory when it counts and this must be one of those times, but.

But although there are trees and rocks surrounding the cove to form its landmarks, it’s still uncanny that you are now treading water in the exact same spot you were last time. If you were superstitious you’d say it was almost unnerving. But the sky is bright and the stars are burning, and you must be better at celestial navigation than you ever gave yourself credit for.

You tread water and enjoy the feel of the water against you.

You tread that water for three more hours, and he does not show.

As you dry yourself and get back into your car, you feel relieved. And it’s only a struggle to feel this way because you’re cold and tired.

And...now that you think about it more, maybe you’re not relieved. Maybe you’re satisfied. Yes. You’re satisfied. That’s better. You’re satisfied that you were right all along, and that there’s nothing in the water waiting for you. No-one has surfaced from the great depths of the world to make contact with you and only you. You’re not that special and you’re glad for it. You’re not special at all, and now you don’t have to worry about an otherworldly encounter with someone whose voice has been absorbed into your consciousness like water into a sponge. Your mind is at peace and now you can focus on the important things. The things that make sense.

That night you stare at your ceiling and do not sleep.

Thin rivers of salt water crawl down your face and you cannot close your eyes. And when the sun breaks over the rim of the world in an hour and you’re forced to show your face in it, you’re sure you’ll have thought of a reason to explain why your face looks the way it does.

The next night you go back to the beach.

You can go to whatever beach or cove or star speckled place on this planet you choose to. It’s your right, and you do not have to justify your actions to anyone. You don’t have to justify them to yourself or a stupid sea creature that may or may not exist and you certainly, absolutely, don’t have to justify it to the ancient part of your brain who is lazily shrugging its shoulders at you and telling you to be patient. It’s telling you that there are things in this life we cannot explain and even fewer that we can control, and when you stop wishing for something that’s when you’ll get it.

That advice is stupid and does not make sense and you wish it would shut up, you wish you would shut up. You wish that none of this had happened because it’s all been nothing but a complete waste of time and you hate wasting time, you hate it. You hate that you’re still thinking about this and that it happened and that it won’t happen again and your head, your stupid water clogged head is bulging from the inside out.

You pull to a screeching stop in the parking lot. You get out of your car and clamber and slip over the rocks towards the beach, cursing loudly as you slip and scrape your skin against them. You kick a small rock so hard that it splashes into the water and you dare him, you fucking dare him to throw it back at you but you know he won’t, because he’s a coward. He’s pathetic.

You tear your clothes off and dump them in a heap on the sand and stride and splash into the water. You swim fast and hard towards your spot and when you reach it you kick harder and pull the water behind you with fiercer and faster strokes that tear the muscles of your arms and you do not stop. You swim and swim and swim until your body rebels and you feel your movements slowing. The rage in your head thins and clears, and you hear yourself gasping for air. But you keep swimming. You swim and swim and swim because you can do whatever the fuck you want out here.

Stroke, kick, breathe; stroke kick breathe; this is your rhythm and your world now and you’re not going to stop for anything or anyone and you swim on and on and on.

Beneath an emotionless moon, in an ocean that’s bigger than every landmass on Earth combined, you swim out into its heart. Your anger and fear and pain is drawing you out into the open water more effectively than any riptide the ocean could deploy.

Stroke. Kick. Breathe. Stroke. Kick. Breathe. It’s difficult to do these things now. It hurts. Everything hurts. Your movements have lost their fluidity and their fire, and your body is shutting down. Your limbs are heavy uncoordinated lumps, and each breath is a raw gasp into your salt coated mouth. You need to stop. You need to take a break.

You slow to a stop and tread water. You focus on your breathing, and how starved of oxygen you are. It hurts to breathe and and it hurts not to, and now that you’ve stopped swimming you’re starting to feel cold. As you turn around to look back at the beach, you feel yourself shiver. And when you face the direction you’ve come from you feel yourself freeze.

The beach isn’t there.

You can’t see it.

Your eyes dart back and forth but you can’t see anything except water. No matter how many times you look you can’t see anything - a tree or a rock or a thin line of sand isn’t going to appear no matter how much you want it to or how hard you strain your eyes and there’s only water; water has eaten everything you once knew and that’s all you can see.

You’ve swum too far and too fast and now you’re going to die.

Your overworked heart dips into emergency reserves and pumps fire into your muscles. GO GO GO it screams in silent desperation. If you don’t move then you’re going to die. If you don’t get back to the beach then you’re going to die, so you really need to move and you need to start moving right. NOW.

You don’t know why you do it, or how you've overridden such overwhelming instincts, but you turn your head to take one last look at the center of the ocean.

A wall of water punches you in the face.

You cough and splutter and spit out sea water as best you can, but you’ve only got your mouth half clear of water before another fat wave fills it up again. You gag and retch and turn around and another one hits you. And then another. And another.

A battalion of waves have sprung up to attack you. They seem to be hitting you from all sides, but even in your panicked state you know that’s not possible. Waves travel in the same direction and are not sentient, and it’s not possible that they’ve been waiting for you to exhaust yourself before they attack you.

You start swimming to try and escape them but there is no escape. They batter you remorselessly in aquatic attack formation. You can see nothing but water, and you sob in acute despair when you realise you don’t know which direction you’re facing. You could be heading further out to sea instead of towards the beach.

A huge wave crests over you and seems to hang above your head, defying the laws of gravity as it looks down to pass sentence on you and you have just enough time to beg for forgiveness and gasp down a breath before it collapses on top of you and pummels you below the surface.

You’re immediately sent spinning in water so obscenely powerful it’s impossible. Life below the surface is not still and peaceful but it is calmer than above the surface, that’s just a fact. But not this time. This time the water is just as vengeful and powerful as it is on top and you don’t know why. But you do know there’s no escape and this is how you’re going to die.

You’re below the surface in a dark wet world with no up or down or left or right or sense of self just water, an onslaught of water, a never ending press of water that’s crushing your last breath out of your lungs and spinning you so fast you have no idea where the surface is and there’s no light or hope just water, just water and dark shapes and as you’re spun around you think you catch a glimpse of a dark humanoid shape with glistening scales and mechanical claws and burning red electrical eyes but on your next rotation towards death there’s nothing there just water, water dark water and shadows and a stream of air bubbles that could be yours even though you’re holding your breath so hard it hurts and--

And something harder presses into your waist.

Your oxygen starved thoughts sharpen and focus. The pressure around your waist is firm and warm and concentrated, as if it’s- as if it’s a pair of hands around you. As if there’s someone behind you holding you around the waist.

“You’re far from home tonight.”

Your eyes widen further at the feel of something soft against your ear.

Lips. It feels like lips are at your ear but that’s not possible. So it must be something else, like seaweed or an eel.

Whatever it is is smooth and soft, and it clamps down gently over your entire ear as if it’s about to swallow it whole. The voice that’s now in your head is so darkly delighted to find you in such a state.

“You won’t last long out here.”

Words cut through the roaring tumult of water effortlessly, and you can’t help but marvel at how clear and precise they are. They’re like a bell. Like a ringing bell at the break of a fresh dawn that you’ll never get to see.

Your trapped stale breath is screaming in your lungs and there’s nothing around you but a kaleidoscope of water and shifting shards of darkness and there’s a pressure, an equal pressure around your waist that feels like gripping hands, but you know it’s just the shape of the pitiless water taking shape around you before it claims you.

Thin lines of pure black eat into the edges of your vision.

You’re suffocating. You’re imagining things. You’re hearing things. You’re starved of air and dying and you’re hearing words of crystal clarity because they’re being spoken by yourself because you’re dying. Your brain is recapping your last living moments and that’s what you’re hearing. You’re dying by degrees and this world of water is soon to be your coffin and there’s no-one in it but you.

Whatever’s covering your ear presses up tighter against it and licks it.

The buildup of carbon dioxide in your blood is setting you on silent fire. It’s now only a matter of seconds before your subconscious trips its switch and you open your mouth to desperately suck down a breath, even though you know that will only speed up the moment of your death and not delay it.

What feels like a tongue but is really just your imagination then slithers inside your ear and licks is slowly.

And then your world stops spinning. You’re seeing straight for the first time since the wave pushed you underwater. You don’t know which direction you’re facing, but you’re finally facing one direction steadily. As if you’re being held in controlling place and in contemptuous defiance of everything the ocean could create.

“Soon.”

Your subconscious is telling you when you’re going to die.

“Return soon.”

And then you’re shooting through the water like an unauthorized nuclear rocket launch.

There is a propellent and a fire and you’re the insignificant payload with no control over your future and you’re streaming through the water so fast that it’s impossible. It’s just not possible to be moving this fast. You can’t be swimming because you have no energy or air left, and you can’t be held in the grip of someone who’s submerged from the depths because that makes no sense and is impossible. Impossible. You must be caught up in a reverse rip-tide, and that’s what’s carrying you so fast back towards the shore. You’re dangerously oxygen deprived and caught up in a rip tide that does not exist and-

-and you see it now. The shore. Through the ever hungry blackness eating into your vision, you see moonlight dappled trees and rocks shooting up towards you at an alarming speed.

But you’re underwater, so how can you see those things? You must be imagining them. You must be wishing for them. Maybe you’re dreaming. Maybe you’re already dead.

“But clean yourself first.”

In contrast to the velocity he’s hurtling through the water at, the words leaking into your ear are slow and calm and teasing.

And then you’re back on the beach.

You’re lying in shallow water on your back on the beach and looking up at the star spattered sky.

You suck in a deep breath as your lungs remember that’s their purpose, and you immediately roll onto your side and gag and choke and vomit up what seems like a gallon of seawater.

The cold white stars bore down on you remorselessly.

You collapse back onto the sand exhausted. You catch your breath and look up at the ink black sky that curves around the world and never ends. You grab fistfuls of gritty wet sand just because you can. Because you’re alive. Because you survived whatever freak occurrence happened out there. You reach up and touch your ear, the one you heard voices in, and grains of sand stick to it and you wonder where he is now and what he’s doing and how long you’re supposed to wait until you return.

You take a long deep breath through your nose and force your body into a sitting position. Your aching muscles protest every step of the way but you ignore them, and when it’s time to put your hands on the sand to help you stand back up on your feet, that’s when you exhale slowly through gritted teeth.

You look out over the calm and gentle water and feel a tugging behind your eyes. It’s like a net of fish hooks has been cast over your skull and they’re trying to pull you back in. Back out to sea, where the hidden killer waves live. Back out to the depths, where he is waiting for you to repay him.

No. Not he. Not anyone. Not anyone or anything that was sentient and speaking, no-one. There was No-One else out there.

You take a deep breath and feel your tortured lungs ache again but this time in a good way, and you focus on how your head feels like it’s being split apart and stitched back together simultaneously. You notice and then ignore what feels like a spattershot of liquid shards sinking into your chest to nestle into the cavity behind your heart.

It takes a lot of effort to turn around and head back towards your car, but you manage to. You should see a doctor and you really need a dentist, but first you need to sleep. Your body needs an emergency recovery and then a well tuned precise one. You drive back home on auto pilot and cannot remember setting off. You know that was dangerous. You know you’re struggling to care. There are so many things you don’t know that you wish you did. You collapse onto your bed and know that you don’t want to dream tonight.

That night you dream of nothing, and you wake up feeling sad.


	2. Mesopelagic [the twilight zone]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ocean horror continues...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I scuba dive whenever I get the chance to, and some of the descriptions in this chapter are based on how I feel about preparing to dive and when I'm immersed underwater. The ways in which you can suffer and die when diving are accurate, as are most of the equipment and how a wetsuit works. But I took a lot of artistic license on several things, such as describing how to enter the water and what an oxygen tank looks like when you're running low on air. It was just fun to write things in this way for this story!   
> Scuba diving is so much fun, and I'd recommend it 100%. I've yet to meet a merformer when I've gone below the waves, but I'm keeping my eyes open...

Your Aquatic North Star is pulsing like an injury that won’t heal.

And you know, you just know, that if you ignore it it won’t go away. You hope that it won’t get any stronger, but you know that it won’t go away.

When you wake up, you know that something has gathered behind your eyes. You can feel it. You can also feel a handful of invisible debris buried inside your chest that is moving, and splintering, and settling, but that must just be exhaustion and your body responding to your bruising both internal and external. There is an explanation for all of this. For the sights you saw and the words you heard below the waves, as well as for the sounds that continue to saturate your brain now that you’re above them. 

Because you’re still hearing things.

It’s been three days since you returned from the water, and you’re still hearing things. 

There are black waves whispering to you. All day and all night they lap at the shores of your hearing and deposit their message one dark grain at a time on your shore. They are building a pyre on your beach, and one day it will be set alight. Overlaying this unauthorised construction is a darker sound, a richer sound, a sporadic swirl of ancient amusement that tells you that you can’t ignore him forever and that you can’t escape even temporarily. It’s in your head and on your eyes and behind your teeth and it does not stop, this parasitic sound you picked up from the water does not stop. 

You must have suffered more than you thought you did when you nearly drowned, and your body hasn’t had enough time to recover from your ordeal, that’s all. A prolonged build up of nitrogen and carbon dioxide and an extreme lack of oxygen in your cells have made them weak. They need time and energy to rebuild and then you’ll be fine, you’ll be just fine. There are explanations for everything. 

There was nothing out in the ocean that night you almost died. That unknown pattern of killer waves could not have been predicted, but it should not have come as a complete surprise. More is known about deep space and the subatomic realm than the bodies of water that cover most of your planet, so you should not be surprised that nature surprised you. And that voice inside your head was YOUR voice inside your head. You hallucinated and told yourself ‘you’re far from home tonight’ and ‘you won’t last long out here’ because that was the truth. You were in terminal trouble out there and simply acknowledged your situation and your final moments and that one day, one day soon or in the future, your essence will return to the water as one day all things do.

But. 

But why did you tell yourself to clean yourself first? 

Maybe...it was because you felt you had to cleanse yourself in preparation for a visit with the deity of death? Or because you...felt unworthy to be accepted? You felt dirty? Unworthy? 

You’re repeating yourself. 

And struggling to come up with an explanation. But there must be one. There’s an explanation for everything. 

You’re being blinded by cataracts and deafened by tinnitus and there are a hundred aquatic diseases you could have picked up when you were being battered below the waves, and since those are conditions known to science and can be treated, you try not to panic too hard or cry behind your fingers too loudly.

On the fourth day you visit the dentist, and ask her to heal your broken tooth. Under the numbing effects of an anesthetic, you pour out in detail everything you saw that night: the shape of him, the feel of him, the sound of him, how you nearly died and the payment you’re worried you’re looking forward to paying and how you’re betraying yourself by even thinking about it. Your mouth is numb and stretched open as she works, and she cannot understand a single garbled word that you’re saying. 

When she finishes and you’ve recovered enough to speak, she asks you what you were saying back there. You lie and say you can’t remember. You in turn ask her a question about the symptoms of tinnitus, and how long it will take for the sounds of crashing water and swishing fins to recede into nothing. She looks at you for a long stretched out moment and says that’s not what tinnitus is, and if that’s what you’re hearing then you need to see a specialist so they can do something about it quickly. You need to see a doctor Quickly. 

That night you do not sleep. 

The playful waves do not let you. 

They jump from one of your ears to the next, and drip spray and salt across your face. They wonder why you’re staying still. They wonder why you’re not playing with them. Why are you not playing in them? Why are you lying down? Why are you not already in them?

Why have you not returned to him?

You squeeze your eyes closed tightly and wish you could see the white flashing stars of a headache appear but you don’t. You only see water. A wall of water with his red neon outline imposed upon it like a reverse negative from a forbidden film strip.

Five days later and the sounds in your ear are growing impatient. You can feel them hardening, feel them thickening. You can feel them growing and hear them baring their teeth because they’re getting louder. They’re getting louder and spitting in your ear and now it’s starting to hurt. It’s starting to hurt how much you’re trying not to hear them because that’s what you’re doing, and they do not like it. 

They do not like being ignored.

Seven days later and there’s a congealed mass of liquid in your ears that ripples whenever you move your head.

You visit the doctor to get them cleaned out, and as the syringe penetrates your ear canal you hear a multi layered scoffing-snickering-scowling that tells you this is a waste of time and energy and that they’re not going away any time soon. They’re not going away ever. They’re not going to leave you until you return. You need to return to the beach. You need to return to the center of all things. They’re not going to force you to go there or push or pull you out there, because this will only work if you make the choice to go back out there. But they’re not going to stay quiet. They’re not going to stay still. He’s not going to stay quiet or still and that’s because he wants you. He wants you to want to return to him.

You thank the doctor and prepare to leave, and refuse to answer his question if you’re alright and are now feeling any better.

Two days later you visit another doctor to get your ears cleaned out again. She inspects them and tells you they’re empty and are perfectly healthy, and you argue back so fiercely that they’re not they’re not they’re NOT that she threatens to call security unless you calm down and leave immediately.

The next day you visit a clinic out of town and persuade someone there to clean your empty ears out. You give them permission to use industrial grade bleach and a heated scalpel if that’s what it takes to return your hearing to you, and you do not care that the medics exchange looks reserved only for chronic cases with no hope of a cure.

That night you hear the waves break and break and break and break and break and break and break and break.

It’s now been eleven days since you washed up on the beach you once thought of as wonderful, and you’ve had enough. 

Your brain has been set on liquid fire and you cannot stand it any more, you cannot live with it a second longer. You know it’s only going to spread throughout your veins and down your spine unless you put it out, and just as you know you can’t throw water on an oil fire to put it out without making things worse, you know that you can’t treat what you’re suffering from with anything that exists above sea level. So you’re going to have to return. You’re going to have to go back to the beach. You’re going to have to go under the waves to find an equilibrium that may cost you more than you can afford but you have to do it, you have to pay his price.

The next night you return.

In the warm night air, next to your parked car above a beach and a cove and a body of water that’s fed by something tainted and magnificent, you don a manufactured salvation against an alien world you’re making the choice to enter. 

Your countdown clock of heat starts ticking the second you put your wetsuit on.

You know that there is no such thing as cold. Not really. Cold is just a lack of heat. One of your laws of physics demands that heat must move from the object that has the most to the object that has the least. It’s a balancing act that will never stop. Nature is in perpetual migration, and you must remember that you cannot control it.

With slow jerking movements, as if it’s three sizes too small for you, you pinch and pull the material of your suit over your legs and arms and squeeze into it. The synthetic neoprene rubber is tight against your skin and it feels unsettling and wrong but you know that it’s good for you, you know that you need it. But it’s still not tight enough.

A wetsuit is closed up and peeled open from the back. A long strip of material is embedded into the zipper to allow you to dress and undress yourself by reaching over your back with one hand. Despite the partner and crew you’re always supposed to have when you go below the water, diving is a solitary sport. When everything is boiled down to its irreducible truth, you only have yourself to rely on. You have to choose your equipment and confirm that it’s good to use, and only you know your limits and how far you can stretch past them.

With careful consideration, you reach over your shoulder and find the zipper and pull it up. Your suit constricts over your stomach and chest and there’s always, always, that flash of panic that your lungs won’t have enough space to inflate but it’s alright - the suit is designed to constrict but still allow you to breathe. It’s designed to prevent what life you have from escaping into the deep. 

You carry your equipment down to the moonlit beach: oxygen tank, flippers, mask, buoyancy control device.

You should have told someone what you’re going to do tonight. If something goes wrong and you don’t return by the predetermined time you and your dive crew agreed on, no-one will know where to look. No-one will be able to find you. No-one will be able to save you. But that’s OK.

You carry your secondary equipment in a bag in your other hand: knives, flares, axe, harpoon gun. 

Because you can save yourself.

With every step you take towards the beach, the roaring rush of water in your ears recedes. Step by step down the path and through the rocks and onto the beach it recedes away from you, like a tsunami in slow motion.

You put on your diving equipment piece by piece and transform yourself. You become layers of sleek black rubber and plastic tubes and bulky dials and taped down weaponry. 

You walk into the water slowly. 

You walk carefully, and slowly, and when the water covers your knees you put your respirator into your mouth. You keep walking and don’t stop, and when the water reaches your thighs you turn your oxygen tank on with a small hiss. You keep walking, and when the water reaches your stomach you suck down your first breath of bottled air. It tastes dry and flat and you keep walking and you keep breathing, step by step and an inhale followed by an exhale, and when the water reaches your chest and covers your heart you turn your head mounted flashlight on. You walk steadily into the water with a bright crown of sodium light atop your head. You keep walking, and when the waves lap at your neck and spit at your cheek you pull your face mask down and snap it onto your skin. You walk defiantly and unafraid into water that now covers your mouth and nose and eyes and when it breaks over your head, when it covers you entirely and prepares to engulf you, you preempt it and defeat it. You press a button on your buoyancy control device and sink down into the depths.

Your freefall is silent and controlled.

You are an intruding speck of life against a gaping canvas of black. This world is hostile, and thick, and cold, and alien. Astronauts train underwater in preparation for space flight, and not just to simulate a lack of gravity. It’s because when you’re in an environment natural law never intended for you to be in, be that the void of space or the deep blue of the ocean or the crisp white peaks of the mountains, you only have yourself to blame if you can’t survive in it.

You descend slowly and stop regularly. This is so you can force open your ear’s eustachian tubes and funnel high pressure air into the dead air space of your middle ears. If you don’t pinch your nose and blow gently - if you don’t equalize safely as you descend - there will be pressure and pain and your eardrums will be punctured. Blood and plasma will leak into it and work together to kill you.

You descend slowly.

You’re descending slowly feet first not just to keep yourself alive, but to look out for him. A line of light from your head lamp burns through the water in front of you, and a vertical stream of tiny bubbles rushes back towards the surface behind you.

You are the epicenter of a diagonal line of light and air.

You descend to a safe depth and spend a moment acclimatizing yourself to the environment. Visibility is poor but not terrible. You have your headlamp on and can still see the rippling surface of the water if you look upwards. You look at your oxygen levels and your wristwatch and calculate how much time you can spend down here before you run out of air. You already know you won’t have enough time, because you can never spend enough time underneath the waves.

You start swimming. All of your momentum comes from your legs. You propel yourself through the water by controlled kicks and never with your arms. Which is perfect, because they’re busy holding a flare gun in one hand and a knife in the other. You swim past rocks and waving vegetation and shoals of fish. You swim down further, towards the curving sea bed. You cannot see the bottom. You wonder how deep it goes, and how much oxygen it would take to try and get there. You swim and breathe and watch out for him. Your eyes roll in their shielded sockets and dart and focus and never stay still. You never stay still. You look and hope and look and regret and look and look and look and never once see him.

You tell yourself this is a good thing, because it’s proof that he doesn’t exist.

A tightness stabs at your chest and it’s difficult to take the next breath. You breathe in deeply and it hurts, and you force yourself to hold it as you override your gut instinct telling you that that thought was not only wrong but was scientifically offensive, and that’s why you’re in pain. You bite down on your respirator and exhale slowly. You’re in pain because of an unexpected reaction to the environment you’re in, that’s all. It’s a trick of blood chemistry that will settle down if you just remain calm and focused and breath in and out steadily. You know that the absence of something isn’t proof that it doesn’t exist, so maybe your logical brain is scolding you for even considering that possibility.

The water is bleeding colour and you are bleeding heat.

You adjust your buoyancy and adapt your inner pressure to the ever crushing weight of the water surrounding you. You dive further into the deep.

You swim and explore and do not see him.

You pass over a lump of floating green and decide to roll smoothly onto your back. You watch expelled air trickle up from your oxygen tank towards the surface, which is now dimmer and so much further away. You wonder how long you could stay down here like this. That question can be easily answered by looking at your oxygen gauge. You reluctantly look at it, and see that you’ve got half of your tank left. You wonder how long you could make that tank last by breathing even slower than how you currently are, which is slow, which is surprising, because you should be fighting to control your anxious breathing in the knowledge that you’re hunting an aquatic monster you know you don’t have a chance of defeating.

Your ears feel fine. They’re clear and pain free and perfect. It’s as if they were designed to be down here.

But the sound that’s curled up behind your eyes has altered in both pitch and frequency. And that’s because you’re down here in the depths, in another world that could kill you in seconds and that’s all, that’s all. They’re not bristling with anticipation that you’re looking for him, and they’re certainly not prickling with regret that you won’t ever find him. 

You wonder if your headlamp is scaring him away or drawing him closer. You don’t know which one you prefer. You want to know if he’s real or not, you simply want to know. You want to know.

You want this to be over.

Your ears pulse sharply at that thought and the pain of it makes you grimace. You force yourself not to think about it again. 

You refuse to look at your watch to see how long you’ve been down here. Because you’ve been down here for longer than you thought. You’re still breathing, which means you haven’t run out of oxygen yet. And you still have a clear shot to the surface, so if your next breath is empty and you’ve sucked your tank dry, you can make an emergency ascent and survive. You shouldn’t even be contemplating that. That’s not safe. That’s not sensible. That mentality is what will get you killed.

But there are so many thoughts you shouldn’t be thinking. It’s easy to let the forbidden seep into your senses down here. No-one is going to stop you. Your environment is only going to encourage you to keep going, to swim deeper, to breathe less, to explore more, to give yourself up to something so much greater than yourself.

Your low oxygen light blinks on. 

You look down to the gauge strapped to the left of your body. A tiny orange light is flashing at you. It’s time to leave. You tilt your head back and look up towards the surface and see two red lights like eyes blinking at you. 

Your stomach spasms with adrenaline and you breathe in deeply and your oxygen light flashes furiously. You glance at it briefly to check you still have air left and haven’t gulped it all down and you whip your head back up to where it just was but there’s nothing there. No natural lights. No colours. No eyes. Just an expanse of black water filtered through with your faint artificial light and wisps of aquatic life too small to see with the naked eye. You breathe in even deeper and fight to calm yourself down. Your heart is pounding with fear and excitement and you need to steady yourself, you need to not panic. Most diving fatalities are caused by the diver panicking and you’re not going to be added to that list, you’re not.

You deflate your buoyancy control device and begin your controlled ascent. You make sure to exhale continuously, so that nitrogen bubbles don’t build up in your blood and make your lungs explode. You bite down so hard on your respirator that your teeth ache. You’re nearly there. You’re nearly there. 

Your low oxygen light switches from a flashing orange light to a steady red beam. 

You’re almost out of time.

You swim and exhale and swim and exhale and don’t forget the most important rule of diving is to never hold your breath.

You break the surface and survive. 

You regret it immediately. You’re about to leave a world you don’t want to be apart from. You’re half submerged in the water and you’re wearing all your equipment and you feel conflicted. You feel trapped between two worlds. You feel disappointed and relieved and cheated. You didn’t see him. You didn’t think you saw him. If you did see him then he doesn’t want you anymore.

You take a deep breath. The sound of your breathing is harsh and mechanical. Your low oxygen light flicks off. You take another deep breath and inhale nothing. You’re out of air.

But you’re not ready to remove your regulator from your mouth. You’re not ready to pull your goggles over your head and turn the dial on your empty oxygen canister to closed. You’re not ready for all of this to be over. Even though you know it is. There is no-one down there. Even though you can’t possibly explore everything the ocean has to hide you have to believe there is no-one down there, because if you don’t then you’ll go mad. You’ll never stop thinking about it. It’s time to end this. 

It’s time to end this.

You take one final deep breath of nothing and then spit your regulator out of your mouth in defeat. You hold that breath for as long as possible before you’re forced to breath natural air again. It tastes cold and artificial. 

You slide your goggles up onto your head and look back towards the beach. You suppose you’re relieved to see it.

Something blocks the moonlight behind you. 

Two large warm hands clamp around your waist and a voice hisses wetly into your ear. 

“It's about time.”


	3. Bathypelagic [the midnight zone]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You're in between worlds. You're half submerged in the ocean and half exposed to the pleasant night time air and he's behind you. It's not accurate to say that he's found you, because he's always known you'd return to him. He's always known where you've been.
> 
> He's been in your head and in your soul, and now it's time for him to break his own surface and take you to where you belong.
> 
> It's time for him to take you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Starscream starts to get a bit handsy with you. And threatens to get a bit bitey...

Your heart and lungs and brain collapse into impossible freefall.

His hands squeeze your waist slowly and you cannot breathe, you cannot breathe. This is not real. This is not real this is not happening and you’re imagining it, you’re imagining everything.

There is a warm smooth pressure against the side of your face, and if you weren’t hallucinating you’d say that it was his cheek pressing up against yours.

But you are hallucinating. You must have used up all your oxygen without realising it, and now you’re hallucinating.

That pressure against your skin increases, and you know that it’s real. A face at least twice the size of your own is pressing up against you. Something is behind you. Someone alive is behind you. But that cannot be possible.

It cannot be possible.

The warm smoothness of his cheek against yours increases in friction. You realise that he’s rubbing up against you. Like he’s nuzzling you. Like he’s curious about you and wants to get to know you. Your head doesn’t move from its locked position, but his does. He swivels his head slowly, and deliberately, and you tell yourself that it’s also carefully but you don’t believe he cares about calming you. He turns his head until the front of his face is pressing into your head and then he pauses.

And smiles.

The obscene curl of his unseen lips against your skin tells you that he already knows everything about you. He knows, and is enjoying your heart stopping reaction as you realise that he does. He nuzzles you again. He does so slowly, and deliberately, and cruelly. He’s playing with you.

And then he inhales you.

With his nose pressed into your wet skin he smells you. He takes a slow breath in through his nose and stretches it out, and out, and out, and your first thought it that he’s going to breathe you in until you disintegrate and are claimed by him and your second thought, which follows on so quickly from the first that it overlaps, is that he breathes oxygen like you do and you can use this knowledge against him and that he’s vulnerable and not immortal and--

There’s a wetness on your cheek. There’s a different kind of texture against your skin.

He must have moved his head away and now you’re crying. But tears don’t crawl upwards. And they don’t coat only one side of your face.

But a tongue does.

The walls of every single cell in every single organ of your body dim and weaken. They are undertaking a self-imposed necrosis, a simultaneous cell death that only happens when the temperature is so cold that hypothermia sets in and the brain must sacrifice parts of the body to divert heat to it and other vital organs to ensure the survival of your irreducible whole. But you are not cold. Your brain is not cold. It’s misfiring and electrifying itself and you are not cold. The water is warm. The air is balmy. The rough tongue that’s being dragged up the side of your face is hot and wet and smells of freshly cut roses and melting metal.

His tapered lizard tongue crawls into your ear.

A prickling eruption cascades down your spine, and your eyes bulge so wide in their frozen sockets you’re surprised you cannot see around the circumference of the world.

He burrows his tongue into your ear slowly. And relentlessly. The pressure of it forces your head to the side and tilts your vision so that the flat line of the beach and the waves breaking on its shore are now diagonal.

His smooth wet tongue reaches as far inside you as it wants to go and then it stops. It rests. It takes stock of what’s surrounding it and doesn’t rush, it doesn’t rush.

He licks you. With just a flick of the tip of his tongue, he licks you.

He does not belong in there. You do not belong out here. Your world has inverted and you want it straight again. But you know that this tilt can never be rectified and this is the plane of existence you now live on.

He licks you as if he’s smelling you. Like a lizard would, like a dragon would. His hands tighten just a fraction harder around your waist as he smells and searches and you wish you could cry out, you wish you could move. You wish this could be over and wish that it never happened. You wish that his tongue was hurting you, because a jolt of pain would be something to focus on and to rage against but it doesn’t. He isn’t hurting you. His tongue feels like a welcome guest that’s promised to make everything alright. It feels normal. It feels quite nice. It feels like a perfectly moulded ear plug designed to shield you from the barrage of sounds that will cause you distress and disturb your inner peace and whose only purpose, whose only point, in this existence is to protect you.

His tongue laps at you once. It’s just a short slow movement of the tip, and you wonder what it would feel like if his tongue was put to use elsewhere inside of you and if he didn’t hold back.

You jerk sharply at that thought. Your body unfreezes, and you tell yourself that it’s unfrozen because that thought about his tongue kick started you awake. And that it was a terrible thought to have. Not a good one, a terrible one. But you’re wrong. You’re wrong twice over, because what his tongue did to you is what made your body come alive.

And what his tongue did was take away the sounds.

He’s cleaned out your ear. He’s swallowed the sounds of stagnant water and eaten the dark red rust that’s been coating you and has given you back your hearing. He’s given you back your mind. There is a bright clean emptiness in your ear and it feels stunning. You slump into his arms at the realisation that one side of you is no longer infected.

You feel the smile on his lips as he withdraws his tongue from your ear.

“Better,” he says.

He squeezes your waist in what you think is reassurance, and when you don’t tense up again he puts his mouth back up against your ear. His lips are coated in salt and feel as soft as velvet. “Much better.”

And then he cleans your other ear.

He cleans this one even slower. Whatever caution and curiosity he had has receded, and now he’s fuelled by something else. His tapered lick inside you is slightly harder and slightly longer, and when you push up and against him to try and straighten your head again, he does the third worse thing since you’ve made contact tonight. Which is to smile wider. The second worst thing is to remove one of his hands from your waist. You don’t know where it’s going to go and what he’s going to do next, and now half of you feels cold and exposed and you don’t want to dwell on why you’re feeling that way so you don’t.

But the worst thing he does is to let you straighten yourself.

You have constructed freedom of movement now. You straighten your head and he doesn’t stop you. You turn and twist your head and he doesn’t stop you. You move your arms and legs in slow exaggerated stretches and he doesn’t stop you.

He doesn’t break contact with you. Like the time the underwater waves attacked you and he held onto you lightly, he doesn’t let go of you now. His tongue is in your ear and his hand is on your waist and he can immobilise you completely and destroy you instantly, but he’s holding back.

A wild thought slips into your mind that he’s not going to annihilate you because he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to see you come to harm and doesn’t want to be responsible for it. He could demonstrate his dominance with a heavy hand but he’s not. Maybe he’s playing with you, and giving you fleeting instances of what life was like before him and what it could be like again if you only had the strength to break free of him. Maybe his interest in you is buried by ambition but underlined by scientific curiosity, and he’s recording every movement and reaction you’re generating simply because he wants to learn. Maybe he’s content to be in second place behind you for the rest of time, but feels a compulsion to prove otherwise and now his instincts are clashing.

You feel his loose hand elsewhere on your body, and your mind wipes itself clean and starts again. You need to focus and not speculate wildly.

Letting you straighten yourself is the worst thing he did because now he thinks you owe him. He could be binding you immobile or drowning you or torturing you or killing you but he’s not, and now you should be grateful.

A spark of rage and contempt flickers in your chest and raises with the heat, but is extinguished in your throat when you feel his hand on it. His long fingers are cupping your chin and his thumb is stroking your cheek and he has fingers, he has fingers. Like a person. He has skin and scales and metal plating and you can feel all of those textures against your skin you can, you can, you’re not imagining that and you don’t know how it’s possible but it is.

He removes your headlamp and goggles with elegant dexterity, and feeds them to the water. Out of the corner of your eye you see them bob in puzzlement beside you. His hand smoothes your wet hair back against your skull and he strokes your ears, your magnificently clear ears, before it slides down your chest. You tense, and he grabs your waist harder and you worry you’re going to get a bruise there, and you worry that you’re worrying about that and not about something more important.

You worry a lot that you’re not more worried.

He puts his hand over your heart, as if he knows what you’re thinking and is telling you that you shouldn’t.

You struggle slightly in his grip, and you know that your movement is fuelled by spite instead of fear. And just when you think that you’re at the point where you could stoke up your raging emotions into something that could ignite, he extinguishes them with a hiss. Except the sound you hear isn’t a hiss. It’s a snick.

A long black claw has extended from his finger with a snick.

_Snick._

You hear another one.

_Snick._

And another one.

He releases his claws theatrically. One by one he frees them from both hands. And you know, you somehow just know, that he’s doing it this way to scare you and to hold your attention taut as you fully absorb the sound of each one before he starts on the next.

He’s only partially right. You pay close attention to the length and weight of his claws around your waist and on your chest and you wonder about them. You wonder what they’re made of and how they can be broken. You wonder if they’re coated in poison and how many ways they could kill you. You wonder if he would let you examine one. If he would let you smell one, and run your finger over one, and place one on your tongue so you could bite down on it and taste it between your teeth. You wonder how long it would then take him to encourage you to do it to every single one of his fingers.

You take in a deep breath and focus, you focus, because there are claws of death splayed out all over you and you don’t know what he’s going to do next.

The hands on your chest and waist move quickly and delicately and his claws shwish and turn and contract and you feel odd. You feel lighter and more exposed and don’t understand what’s happened, you don’t know what he did. Out of the corner of one eye you see your buoyancy compression device floating on top of the water. And in front of you, spreading out and sinking slowly, are your weapons and equipment.

He’s stripping you. He’s disarming you. He’s transforming you back into what you are when you’re on dry land and you don’t like it. You don’t want to be so vulnerable out here, even though you never once reached for a weapon. You never even tried to reach for a weapon, for the knife on your arm or the flare gun in a pocket on your vest. You could have primed and aimed the gun over your shoulder and fired it point blank into his face. You didn’t try and defend yourself because you knew there was no point in fighting a battle you already knew you’d lost. You have too much experience with that to actively seek out another one. You didn’t try to fight back because he would have seen and stopped you and would have become angry and hurt you.

You didn’t try and fight back because you didn’t want to hurt him.

_tink_

_tink_

_tink_

Your oxygen tank is still strapped to your back. Your bottle of lifesaving air is still on you and he hasn’t removed it, he hasn’t stripped you completely. He’s conscious of the symbolic effect that being without an air supply in the water means to you. He’s playing with you. He’s cranking up your fear and drawing this out. He wants to see more reactions from you. He wants to make you scared. He wants to make you dependent on him. He wants your complete and undivided attention and maybe he wants all of the above but you don’t know what you want.

_tink_

_tink_

_tink_

He’s tapping at your tank with the tip of a claw.

_tink_

_tink_

_tink_

The tank you know is empty.

_Tink._

_Tink._

_Tink._

Does he know it’s empty?

_Tink, tink._

_Skritch._

_skritch, skritch, skritch skritch SKRRRRRIIIIIIIIITCH_

He draws a claw across the tank, and you grimace at the sound it makes. You feel the weight on your back shift as he moves his hand around it.

“Cumbersome,” he says. “This is in my way.”

He runs a claw over the tank with another long _SKKKKRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTCH_ and you grit your teeth at the sound of it, and bite your tongue so that you don’t snap at him to stop fucking doing that.

That those are the first words you want to say to him says a lot about yourself.

He pinches your oxygen tank with the claws on his thumb and forefinger. He wiggles it about a bit and you sway alongside it. And then he squeezes. He punctures the tank’s casing as if it was a liquid bubble, and your heart kicks up in fresh panic at hearing the sound of the material compressing. You don’t need the tank any more. There’s no air left inside of it. But to react in terror when the tank gets damaged has been inbuilt into you after years of diving and is now instinctive.

When your tank is ruined, he cuts it off you. It follows sadly in the wake of your compression device, and chases it out to sea.

You have no shielding left against him.

He puts his other hand on your waist and squeezes and pulls you back into his chest, and you know that you never had a shield to begin with.

His hands are warm on you. They’re warm and not unwanted. They’re on you and you’re not fighting back and you shudder at that thought, you finally move against him and he responds by squeezing you again. His hands could crush your body between them effortlessly, and you’d remain alive long enough to hear your ribs crack and your heart fail and your last breath of air wheeze out of punctured lungs.

But he’s not hurting you. He’s holding you. You don’t want him to do either, but what you want seems to count for less than nothing. But for every second longer that he holds you that’s another second of life you’ve held onto. And that’s why you’re not struggling too hard. That’s what you tell yourself and that’s what you struggle to believe, that you’re only following the diamond hard laws of human survival instinct.

His hands are warm. They encircle your entire waist and his fingers link together across your stomach and chest and they’re warm. They’re the conduit for a transfer of heat from one source to one that has less. He knows that you’re the one who’s lacking. You’re lacking so much more than heat, and does he know that as well?

You bob together in the water and you adjust. Your body adjusts to the temperature change and you adjust your expectations. There may be no good way out of this encounter for you. You may be killed any second now. Any second now.

Any.

Second.

Now.

...

So.

So why start fighting? Why keep your muscles tense and ready to move when you know it would be pointless to even try? You will not be allowed to escape. Why keep thinking about air and water and the mechanics of each stroke of your arms and every kick of your legs that would take you back to the beach? You will not be allowed to reach it. So why not relax into him fully. Why not pretend the beach did not exist. He hasn’t hurt you so far. In fact he’s done the opposite - he’s saved your life and lifted your pain and he is not hurting you.

Sharp tips of teeth graze the back of your neck.

Your idling muscles snap tuat and your blood flows and your brain is submerged into the undiluted bleach of survival instincts and you strain against his grip around you. This is no academic calculation of pain and possibility or a dreamy scenario with pleasant potentials - this is raw and dangerous and is a response baked into every iteration of humanity that has ever existed.

You try and push up and away from him and you kick your legs and you pour your heart and soul into your escape attempt regardless of how futile it may be but before your cup is drained even half way, before you can hurt yourself needlessly and start to cry from your lips and your eyes and your heart, you feel his teeth bite down onto you.

You freeze.

They bite down gently.

You know there’s no escape. Your brain knows there’s no escape from this and that aggression is futile and if you stay still and stay silent and don’t give him a reason to become upset then your life may be extended for a few more seconds and that’s all you want, that’s all you want.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

Four more seconds.

You waste what could be the last drops of your life counting every atom of it.

He withdraws his teeth from your neck. You force yourself not to move. You force yourself not to hope.

He rests his forehead on the back of your head.

A wetsuit is closed up and peeled open from the back.

This thought slides into your mind at the exact same time he starts to bend your head down. He looms over you and uses his head to push yours down and forward until your chin touches your neck and your nose is skimming the surface of the water. Salt spray mists over your face and the water is close, it’s so very close to you. If you’re pushed down further, just one inch further, water will seep into your mouth and nose and if you’re held in place like that you will drown.

Your muscles spasm and tighten, and he squeezes you in a warning that means you must not move, you must not dare to move from this position that he’s put you in. Your body obeys and you stay still. The water smells of clean salt air and stagnant bleach.

His head pulls back from yours, and you sense him straightening.

Nothing happens.

He is examining you. You can feel his red eyes upon you. You can feel the artificial light from his metallic rods and plated cones scanning you and you wonder what he sees. The back of your neck burns from being stretched over.

A long strip of material is embedded into the zipper, which allows you to dress and undress yourself by reaching over your back with one hand.

This thought materialises into your mind a split second after you feel the zipper on your wetsuit swing.

It swings quickly and not for very long and then it swings again. And again. But he can’t be flicking it in playful curiosity, because both of his hands are still around your waist. You can feel all ten of his long digits as if they’ve always been a part of your skin. But something’s swinging your zipper. And if he’s not using his hands, then he must be using his…

Your zipper swings again.

And when it stops swinging, when he realises that you’ve realised what he’s doing, he stops using the tip of his tongue to flick it.

He waits a second more.

And then he rests his tongue on the back of your neck. It’s wide and flat and smooth and metallic and he rests it on you carefully. The back of your neck is currently three parts synthetic rubber and one part skin, and the noise he makes as he absorbs your taste suggests he likes them both.

You concentrate on keeping your breathing steady. You can do it if you focus. A thin line of fluid from his tongue crawls down your neck and infiltrates your wetsuit. It’s warm, and rich, and crawling slowly, and you wonder if it’s dangerous before remembering that your ears are already coated with it and it’s too late to worry about that now.

You wonder what it would taste like.

You shift in his grip but don’t raise your head up and he sways with you. The line of fluid crawling down your back slows and thickens. You struggle not to close your eyes and struggle not to push back into him and struggle not to think about how you’d react if he dragged his tongue around your neck and pried your mouth open with it and consumed your own tongue with it.

His tongue peels itself away from your neck and you tense. What you’ve just been thinking about is going to come true, and you don’t know how to feel about it. Nerves and curiosity and anticipation all blossom and collide and then dissolve, because he’s not moving his tongue around to your mouth. He’s moving it down your neck.

He works his tongue underneath your wetsuit’s zipper. And when it’s immobile on his tongue, when wet metal lays gently on top of whatever he’s made out of, he sucks it into his mouth. And bites down gently on it.

The smell of water is sharp below your nose and the smell of alien breath is sweet upon your neck. With careful consideration, as if he has all the time in the world with which to spend with you, he unzips you.

He unzips you slowly.

One, two, three rungs of your suit’s ladder split apart as he pulls your zipper down with teeth like scythes. You wonder at how you can hear them break so clearly. Four, five, six, he’s descending you slowly and there are so many more to go, there are so many brave little teeth keeping you together that he’s going to ruin. Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve and down and down he goes.

In order to keep your head in place you have to force it to stay still. You have to provide a counter to the force he’s exerting on you and work hard not to let him pull your head back and expose your throat to everything that you can’t see. You struggle not to struggle and struggle to stay still and all you want to do is close your eyes and turn over onto your back and blindly face the night sky as the water exerts its invisible physics on you to keep you from sinking into its depths.

Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five little locks all burnt through and you don’t know how you know this number to be accurate but you do. He unzips you remorselessly. Slowly and steadily he unpeels what is artificial from what your true nature is and it’s cool, it’s refreshing, it’s freeing.

The night air finds every crack of your freshly exposed skin and sinks into it and that’s what’s cool, and droplets of water follow their lead and that’s what’s refreshing, and there is no longer a constriction around your chest and heart and that’s what’s freeing.

He unzips you until the zipper reaches the surface of the water and then stops. The last part of your zipped up wetsuit is underneath the water, but he is not continuing. Maybe this was his intention all along. Maybe he’s bored. Maybe you should reach around behind yourself and show him how it’s done.

“Not here,” he whispers into your ear. “Not like this.”

You’re not sure what he means. Except you do. Part of you knows.

“Come with me.”

Part of you has always known.

“Come with me to a cave that lives far below the depths.”

That part of you is thrumming like an electric star that’s finally been given permission to shine.

You look into the water and do not straighten your head. You imagine that the water is transparent. You pretend that you can see for miles and miles down through clear water that’s so teaming with eels and sharks and starfish and bursts of fish in every colour that it’s terminally infected with life. You look down. And down. And down you continue to look, past the never ending clouds of animals and vegetation until you see a small bright light burning beside a rock. It’s coming from inside a cave that’s been hidden since it was created, and only he knows its address. Only he has the key to it. And he’s inviting you to go inside it with him.

“I’ll die,” you tell him without thinking. “All that way down I’ll--”

This is not what you should have said. You should have told him no. You should have shouted. You should have cried or screamed or laughed in his face. You should not be deliberating the logistics and limitations of travelling to an underwater cave that you know you can’t reach on one deep lungful of air alone.

“We all die.” He pours these words into your ear with the consistency of black honey. “But tonight is not your night.”

If the lack of oxygen doesn’t kill you first then the pressure will. If you dive fast and steady and don’t pause regularly to equalize your internal pressure it will kill you.

You swallow. "I'll die."

It is impossible for you to dive down to the depths you know he wants to take you to. It's impossible.

“No,” he says in a tone of pleasant tainted kindness that does the opposite of reassure you. "You won't."

You open your mouth to respond and he puts his hand on your head and his fingers in your hair. He tilts your head back until your neck is stretched wide open and now you’re looking up at him, you’re looking up at him and seeing him for the first time.

His magnificently scaled face with red glass stars for eyes blots out the moonlight above you.

"Take a deep breath."

He pushes your head below the surface.


	4. Abyssopelagic [the abyssal zone]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Starscream takes you down to the depths, and then takes you further.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is when things get explicit, so prepare yourself.
> 
> Also thank you to everyone who's read this/left a comment/left a kudos, it's all appreciated!

You struggle.

You can’t override a survival instinct that’s been baked into your species since it broke into sentience and you fight to escape from him because you’re drowning, you’re dying by degrees.

You thrash. You kick. And when you kick you don’t connect with anything but you still keep kicking. Streams of bubbles float away as you fight, and you wish you were going with them. You make a club out of your fist and hit whatever part of him you can reach. The water seeps all power out of that movement and it’s slow, and pointless, and you’re slow, you’re slowly dying and you’re both sinking. He’s activated his internal compression device and is pulling you down vertically through the water.

Down.

Down through the euphotic zone, which would be lit by sunlight if it was daytime. You sink with obscene speed and sharp purpose, and you see that the fingers of moonlight that are still able to penetrate the water are shrinking. They're melting. 

They've gone.

You sink quickly. The moonlight zone bleeds into the twilight zone, and all natural light surrenders itself to oblivion. It’s dark. It’s so dark now, and you cannot see a thing. 

Your lungs are burning. 

You only managed to snatch a quick shallow breath before he pushed you underwater, and now that air is running out. Your cells are screaming for more and it hurts. It hurts and it’s scary and this is how you’re going to die. You thrash harder and faster and you know this is using up more oxygen than if you didn’t move at all, but if you don’t move at all then how are you going to escape?

You’re not. That’s the answer. You’re not going to escape from here. You’re not going to escape from him. You’re going to drown in the cold dark depths with a monster’s arm wrapped around your waist. 

Your lungs are crying.

You have to breathe. You have to. There is an awful compulsion building up inside of you that will make you try to breathe. All humans have it. Even though you know that to open your mouth and suck in water will kill you, you’re still going to do it. It’s inevitable. It’s relentless. The mechanics of humanity are a multitude of untranslatable and contradictory instructions, and soon your attempts to stay alive will be extinguished by an override order designed to do just that.

Your lungs are failing. 

Your time is nearly over.

You stop struggling against him. You clamp your hands over your nose and mouth and bite down on your tongue. These actions are pointless, but you can’t help but fight to stay alive. The prospect of one more second alive is enough to halt the override order to stay alive. It’s a mess. You’re a mess. You’re light headed and scared and you hope, you really do hope, that it won’t hurt too much when your mouth opens and the dark ocean pours down into it.

In the all consuming dark, you feel him put one of his hands over yours. He taps it with a finger. And slowly, one by one, he peels your fingers away from your face.

This is it. He wants to see you as you drown. He can see in the dark, and he wants to see your face. You close your eyes. You won’t give him the satisfaction of looking into your mind and reading your final thoughts. 

He puts his lips on yours, like a chaste kiss from a nervous lover. You almost inhale in surprise but you don’t, you stop yourself through a sheer act of stubborn will. He wants to take your final breath. You will give that to the ocean, but not to him. Never to him. You want to do something that won’t give him any sort of satisfaction but you’re coming up empty, you’re running on empty and you’re sinking, you’re sinking quickly and quietly and soon the ocean will take you.

The pressure in your chest is excruciating. 

He opens his lips and widens them, and your first thought is how much you hate how warm they are. Your second thought is that he’s created a perfect seal around your mouth.

It’s nearly there. It’s burning up along your throat and pushing against your clamped down teeth and it’s going to explode through your fingers and you’re not going to be able to stop it, that terrible urge to inhale air that isn't there. 

You feel him smile into your face.

You tremble. Your muscles shiver from the effort of not breathing but you’re going to fail, you’re going to fail. You don’t want his kiss to be the last thing that enters your body. He’s taken the shape of the water and assumed its control and it doesn’t matter what you inhale now, because the end result will be the same. 

His tongue seeps in between your lips. It prises your teeth open. And in the split second it takes for your urge to breathe to roar triumphant, he overtakes it. He overrides it all and pushes a jet of oxygen into your lungs and you inhale it desperately. 

He is horrible. And wonderful. He’s saving your life and you hate it. 

You don’t stop sinking. 

He takes you down into the depths and you do not drown. You do not get lost. He is your new source of oxygen, your unwanted regulator.

You fight the urge to suck down his oxygen quickly, in case it exhausts his supply and you kill yourself. You fight the urge to dig your nails into his hand to try and remove it, in case you succeed. You fight the urge to reach up and explore where his gills are, in case your fingers like what they find and don’t want to leave.

Your thoughts are clear. Your head is clear, and it shouldn’t be. It should be on compressed fire. Your ears should hurt. You should have built up a fatal pressure by descending without equalizing your pressure, but you haven’t done that. You weren’t given the chance to do that. Your head doesn’t hurt. Your ears don’t hurt. None of you hurts. 

You haven’t once felt cold. 

You continue to sink smoothly down into the depths. None of this is right. None of this should be possible. The deep ocean levels are different worlds with different laws of living, and you are breaching them all. You are ignoring them all. Or maybe they’re ignoring you. Maybe they’re bending and undulating to accommodate you. Maybe they’d given up all hope of ever seeing you, and now they’re scrambling to make your descent to your throne as smooth as possible.

Maybe you’re dying from oxygen deprivation, and everything that’s just happened are hallucinations your oxygen starved brain is firing off before it shuts down forever. That would make so much more sense. 

Your feet hit solid ground.

You’re so startled that you spasm and hold hard onto his arm. You have no idea where you are, or how far down you are. The water is an all consuming atmosphere of heavy liquid, and you should have been crushed by it now. You should have been compressed by the pressure. 

You see a light out of the corner of your eye. It’s revealing a large semi-circle that’s sunk into the ocean floor. It’s an entrance. And it’s outlining it in red. Red, the colour of danger. Of warning. Of a place that should be avoided at all possible costs to those who want to live. 

He kicks forward and takes you there. 

The cave looms larger in the gloom, and as you pass underneath its archway and into the tunnel beyond, you take notes of the lines that define it. The rocks that form the tunnel look worn, and are saturated with salt and vegetation and the grime of sea life. But there is a symmetry and precision to them. They look structured. This tunnel looks like it’s been engineered.

You are pushed along it. You can tell that if you were to stretch your arms out wide, they wouldn’t reach the sides. Running along the top and bottom of the walls are small red lights. They burn softly through the water, like a parade of eyes welcoming you back home. They burn the same colour as his eyes do. 

And then you’re ascending.

Your head breaks the surface as suddenly as when it was pushed under it, and the loss of water on your skin is a shock. He removes his mouth from yours, and you take a deep breath before you can think about it. This air doesn’t taste as good as his does.

You close your eyes and open them back up and breathe in deeply and breathe in deeply. You look around. 

You’re in a cave. You’re in a large underwater cave, with curved walls that stretch up and up and up to a ceiling so high you cannot see it. But you can see a constellation of small sodium lights twinkling above you. For a moment you’re almost convinced that you’re back outside and are looking up at your planet’s sky. But your stars don’t flash blue, white and yellow.

He nudges you forward. 

Ahead of you is a ledge, and you swim towards it. As you get closer, you see that beyond the ledge is another tunnel. You wonder how far back this cave goes. You wonder if there is a warren of twisting tunnels and star speckled areas beyond it. You wonder how large this place is, and how long he’s known about it. You wonder if he created it, and has brought you here to show it off. 

You reach the rock ledge. He lets go of you. You take a deep and steadying breath, and put your hands onto the rock. It feels warm and stable. You find footholds for your feet. You test out your position, take another breath, and begin to lift yourself out of the water. The ledge isn’t high, and soon you’ve got the upper half of your body free. You brace your weight on your arms, and prepare to haul your lower body and legs out.

Large alien arms wrap themselves around your waist.

“Now,” his voice whispers in your ear, “Where were we?”

You shudder in his grip and try to pull yourself free but you can’t. You’re trapped. You are so completely trapped. His hands are warm and huge and so unfortunately familiar. They hold you securely, and do not hurt you. 

He nuzzles into your neck. “Hmmmm….” 

One of his hands starts to stroke you. It then moves idly along your waist and up your back. It stops.

“Ahh, here we are.”

His mouth moves away from your ear. His lips drag gently along your cheek, along your jawline, down to your neck and the top of your back to the start of your spinal column and they’re warm, and smooth, and never once break contact with your skin. His lips move down your exposed back until they stop. They’ve reached the place where your wetsuit’s zipper is. 

He licks the skin of your back. And sucks the zipper back into his mouth. 

He does this with a practised ease, as if he’s done this countless times already and now it’s become muscle memory. More of your body is now above the water, which means he can unzip you all the way down to where your metallic ladder ends.

He takes his time with you. Just like he did on the surface of the water, he takes his time with you. 

The underground air feels both cool and humid on your freshly exposed skin.

He finishes unzipping you. He waits a moment. 

He waits a moment more.

He waits until you shift in place.

He gently pops the zipper out of his mouth. And puts the flat of his tongue on the base of your spine. You close your eyes and inhale a shallow breath at the feeling of it.

His wide tongue covers every part of your exposed skin from one breach in your wetsuit to the other. It feels warmer than a wetsuit. It feels better than anything you’ve ever felt before. He moves his head in order to drag his stationary tongue up you and it’s warm, and smooth, and almost frictionless but not quite, not really. Lubricant is leaking out and leaving a path of wetness for him to return to. His tongue is a muscle unlike any you’ve ever felt before, and you don’t know if it’s organic or metallic or a seamless blend of both. He drags it slowly, slowly, all the way up your skin and to your neck and before you can think about it you tilt your head in case he wants access to the side of it.

He does.

His face presses into yours as he hauls his tongue over you and it’s not obscene, it’s not disgusting. It’s not unwanted. He smells of steel and science and something so ancient no other tongue has a name for it. 

“We’re still not finished,” he tells you. “In fact,” he says, as he angles his mouth towards your ear, “We have barely just begun.”

Blood pulses thickly in your ears. And you welcome it. This is the sound of what should be in your body - the sound of chemicals and hormones and the mechanical processes of your body pumped full of adrenaline and priming itself for fight or flight or freeze. You no longer have an insidious soundtrack of stagnant water and rotting vegetation in your ears and you’re grateful, you’ll always be grateful that he cleaned them out for you. But you’ll never forget that he was the one who put them there in the first place.

Didn’t he?

He kisses your ear. 

You open your eyes. You can see the outline of his large head and long tongue out of the corner of your eye. A soft red glow from his eyes leaks through into it.

He kisses your ear again. You wonder if he’s going to put his tongue back inside it. The thought is not an unpleasant one and you wish that it was. He kisses your ear for a third time, and you twist your head towards his. His tongue moves with your ear, and doesn’t stay in place to allow your lips to come closer to it. He kisses your ear for a fourth time, and that familiar smile of his imprints itself on you.

He’s teasing you. He knows what you want and he’s not going to give it to you. And he’s certainly not going to allow you to take it from him. 

“I-,” you start to say and then stop.

He stops. He’s curious as to what you’re going to say next. 

You’d like to know that as well. 

“I would like…” you say slowly, because you’re not sure what you’d like to happen. You don’t know what you want him to do or not do and you don’t know what you want to do yourself. So you stall. And make it seem deliberate. 

“I would like.” You say this as if it’s a statement. 

He exhales slowly, and you don’t know if it’s in confusion or annoyance or concern. It’s probably not in concern, but you never know. There is so much about him that you don’t know.

He licks your ear, and you make your own sort of noise.

“And what,” he says slowly, as if this is the most boring and obvious thing in the world but he’s going to indulge you by asking it anyway, “Would you like?”

A hundred answers rise up your throat and stand to attention in your mouth. 

You do not answer him. You cannot give him an honest answer at this time and you don’t trust yourself to lie to him for fear that he’ll see right through it and will punish you. So you stay silent. 

But you don’t stay still.

You make a half-hearted attempt to pull yourself further up the ledge. He holds onto you tighter and holds you in your place. You’ve given him an opportunity to change the subject and save face, and you wonder if he’s going to take it or cut straight back to demanding what it is that you want. Maybe he’ll cut you in order to know it. 

You feel two sharp pin pricks on your waist and your breath freezes in your lungs and your eyes open wide, wide, wide and he’s going to cut you. You’ve pushed him too far and you spoke back to him and now you’re going to suffer, now you’re going to hurt. He’s once again read your mind and is preparing to do what you most fear and now you’re going to hurt.

And once again you’re proven wrong.

His huge hands wrap effortlessly around your waist and cover most of your lower body. His thumbs rest on the small of your back and each one is tipped with a claw, with a slim sharp claw that’s been whittled down by evolution and carved out of material unknown. 

He pierces you with them. 

You tense in preparation for the twin sting and the duel internal trauma. His claws are refined weapons but they’re also tools, and he pierces you with them just hard enough to break the material of your wetsuit. They graze your skin like a grateful lover’s touch and do not break its surface.

He moves his tongue away from your ear. With a cruel slowness he moves it away from your mouth and puts it back onto your neck. He drags it down your spine as if condemned. Maybe he is. You know you are and maybe he is as well and this is where you both belong. His tongue rises over every one of your vertebrae and dips down between your hollows and your skin is fizzing, it’s tingling something sharp. Maybe there’s a foregin chemical in him that’s giving you an allergic reaction and soon you’re going to suffer, soon you’ll start to burn.

He holds you steady and pushes his tongue further down you. It squeezes between your wetsuit and lays claim to all of your skin and it goes lower, and slower, and lower and the exposed skin you have left narrows and still he doesn’t stop. He licks down you until he can’t go any further and voluntarily traps himself between what’s left.

In the long stretched out second where he pretends to consider what he’s going to do next, you take a moment to compose yourself. You take a breath. In and out and that’s all the time you’re given before you feel a slight sharpness on both sides of your waist. He’s gently stabbing you with his claw tips. He presses down just hard enough to pierce the wetsuit’s material and not your skin, never your true skin.

He pulls your second skin apart.

With a slow tear of synthetic rubber he rips lines into your wetsuit and pulls it apart. His claws skim you but they never cut you, they never hurt you. He widens the opening in your wetsuit across your backside and then he curls down lower. He carves a long line down each of your thighs slowly, slowly, slowly. He unpeels you thoughtfully and thoroughly, and the air of the cave sinks into you as if magnetised to it. 

The only part of you that’s still in the water are your legs below the knees, and that’s where he stops cutting. The flaps of your wetsuit flop against your skin and you’re exposed to him, you’re so shamefully exposed to him. He retracts his claws and holds you around the waist again. You wonder if he’s going to use only his thumbs to spread you open. You wonder if he’ll dip one thumb down onto your backside and spread you to the side. You wonder if he’ll then use his other thumb to do the same thing on the other side of you, or if that thumb will stroke your entrance to feel how tight you are and how much wetter he needs to get you before he can raise himself up and--

You can’t help but push back into him.

His hands stay on your waist, and you wish you weren’t disappointed with this. You sense him adjust his position behind you. You can’t see where his face is but you know that it’s now perfectly aligned with where he wants his mouth to be. You feel an isolated heat against your skin and you swallow and swallow again and your dry mouth tastes of salt.

He licks you.

You inhale with a gasp.

And when you finally have to exhale, when you finally have to breathe again because that compulsion has now overridden the soup of conflicting desires in your head, he licks you again.

This time he licks you slower.

You moan softly. You wish you’d thought to cover your mouth when you’d let out that sound, but the position you’re in means that you have to use both of your hands and arms to hold onto the ground. He’s put you like this deliberately. He’s bent you over the ledge so that you can’t escape or adjust yourself or cover your mouth in a token attempt to be silent. 

He licks you again.

And again.

This lick is even slower. And rougher. And feels so much fucking better. 

He licks you like that again, and again, and again.

His thick wet tongue laps slowly at your entrance. It reaches all the way around your front to your clit and is dragged back around underneath again, and again, and again. 

Why try and be quiet. There isn’t anyone around to hear you. 

The friction you’re feeling is sublime. His tongue is the perfect amount of roughness against your sensitive skin and every time he drags it back, every time he pushes it forward, you feel yourself getting wetter. You’re leaking onto him and it’s shameless. At this thought you push down into him before you can stop yourself and it’s shameless. Every time he laps at you you squirm in place and don’t try to escape him and it’s shameless. 

Your body is reacting unconsciously to physical stimulation, that’s all. You’ve survived a horrible infection in your ears and didn’t drown when you were swept out to sea and you didn’t drown going down to this cave and he’s not killing you, he’s not hurting you, and you’re so relieved and so flooded with chemicals that you’re acting on autopilot and only care that you’re alive.

You don’t care that this is something you’ve thought about every night since you first saw him.

You hold onto the ledge harder. You feel the warm width of his thick tongue push along you. You adjust your position. You feel the length of it slide back along you and you calculate the last remaining angle and pull yourself forward.

His rhythm falters. It’s only for a second. It only lasts for as long as your higher brain takes to tell you that you acted on the exact opposite of instinct just now and that you should be disgusted with yourself. He knows what you want, and he’s going to give it to you. And he’s going to allow you to take it from him. 

He restarts his slow and steady rhythm and you start up an opposite one. Every time he pushes his tongue forward on you you push back along it, and every time he drags his tongue back along you you pull forward on it.

Back and forth and back and forth you ride his tongue with deep panting breaths and it’s shameless. 

You think his mouth is curled up into a smug bastard smile, but you can’t be sure. You can’t be sure how long you’ve been doing this or how long you’ve been down here or how you spell your own last name, because there’s a liquid fire spreading viens of lava between your legs and up your stomach and you can’t think of anything else except how good it feels to rock along his tongue like this. You’re in unchartered territory in more ways than one and you do not have a map, you do not have a way home, so you do what your species has done since the dawn of its creation - you adapt. And improvise. And enjoy the sheer magnificence of being alive in this precise and fleeting moment.

You ride his tongue as slowly as you can bear it. 

He doesn’t change his speed and you’re grateful. You fear he’s going to take you to the edge and then leave you but he’s not stopping and you have to trust him. He’s taken you to these depths and didn’t leave you and now you have to trust him again. You think you have no choice but to trust him but that thought isn’t right, that thought has always been wrong, because you’ve always had a choice. Your life is nothing but a series of choices in how to react to the expected and unexpected waves that break over it and you are making one of those choices now. 

Pressure pressure pressure it’s contracting and getting hotter and you’re feeling so much hotter and your breaths are as uneven as the laps of his tongue are smooth and they’re shallow, they’re quick shallow pants, because you’re almost there you can feel you’re almost there and you squeeze your eyes shut and hope he doesn’t leave and hope he doesn’t--

You come hard and cry out something unintelligible to the dark. You grip the ledge so hard it leaves dents in your palms and you jerk violently on his tongue and buck back into his face. He tightens his grip and pulls you back into his face and doesn’t stop licking you, he doesn’t stop moving his tongue.

You need to ride this out and enjoy it and recover but he’s not letting you, he’s not letting you. You gasp and grit your teeth as your orgasm washes over you and a new fire consumes the still scalding remains of the first and it’s immediate, it’s all flowing into one. 

He needs to stop for just a moment to let you recover and start afresh but he’s not going to. He’s not going to let you go anywhere but over the edge and he’s licking you, he’s licking you, his tongue is nothing but rough wet targeted licks against your clit and soaking entrance and he’s not stopping, he’s not stopping.

You tense and moan and wish he’d give you just a moment to recover but this feels so good, it all feels so good. No-one’s ever had the desire or the stamina to do this to you and you like it. Maybe the novelty will wear off soon but right now in this magnificent fleeting moment it’s still riding high and you’re still riding him, and you can’t remember when you started rocking against his tongue again but you have, you have.

You rock on him and he licks you and you hold hard onto the ledge and moan so loudly it borders on a scream. 

You come with a violent jerk. Your grip on the ledge is cutting deeper lines into your palms and it stings.

And he doesn’t stop.

Fear licks at you with a different flavour. You wonder if he’s going to do this to you until you pass out. He’s going to pleasure you until it becomes torture and he will not stop, he will not stop. Not until you lose consciousness or offer up your soul in exchange or answer his question about what it is that you want and--

Your eyes focus on that thought. Maybe that’s all that he wants from you - an answer. And this is his playful cruel way of getting it from you. 

But he doesn’t give you the chance to think about coming up with an answer, because he’s adjusted the position of his head and now his tongue is moving again. 

You’re so wet that his tongue meets no resistance at all when it pushes up inside you.

You gasp again and grip onto the ledge even harder and it stings, but that pain fades quickly. 

He curls his tongue inside you. He curls it and worms it up inside of you just like he wormed the tip of it inside your ear. Except he can fit more of himself inside you now. His tongue is thick and wide and he pushes into you remorselessly and it’s getting tight now, you’re becoming a tight fit, but it’s wet and so are you and he pushes up further. 

He puts his hands on either side of your backside and spreads you open. 

Another inch of his tongue pushes into you. 

Still keeping you spread open so wide that your muscles are starting to ache, he pulls you back down onto him. He pulls you down into his face and onto his tongue at the same time he pushes upward into you.

A long stream of noise is escaping from your parted lips like an uninterrupted supply of escaping air bubbles and you’re loud, you must be making so much noise.

His tongue now reaches so far into you that it’s obscene. This must be dangerous. This must be unhealthy. You wonder how you’re going to suffer because of this because one way or another you will, you’re sure you will. You wonder just how far he put his tongue up inside of you and how it will feel. 

He pulls you back down onto him and you don’t try and fight it.

He licks you. The tip of his tongue licks at your walls and you feel your toes curl underneath the water.

He pushes further up into you. He’s deep now. He’s in deep and it’s feeling weird as well as feeling good and you’re not sure he should be in this far you’re not sure of so much down here. You hold yourself steady and try not to move.

He tightens his grip and pulls you down further onto him.

Your next moan is laced with a mild pain and a hot shame that it’s only mild. You should be writhing in agony. You should be sobbing and biting your lip to bloody shreds. You should be pounding the ground and scraping your palms raw in your desperate attempt to get free.

He licks you again and your toes curl tighter.

Once you're completely penetrated on his tongue he takes one hand off your waist and reaches around to your front. He places it on your clit. But he doesn’t rub it or stroke it. If you want the pressure and the pleasure from being touched there, you’re going to have to do the work yourself. You’re going to have to grind against him while he holds you in your place.

So you do.

You resume your familiar rocking rhythm against him as much as possible. His finger is wide, and just like his tongue it covers every part of you. But unlike his tongue his finger is smaller, more compact. The surface area is condensed and precise and when you grind into it you feel a harder resistance and it feels good. You grind into his finger and rock back to change the angle of his tongue inside you and it feels very good. 

You grind into his finger and rock back to change the angle of his tongue inside you and push down onto it so that it presses up against your ceiling and it feels better than good. You do this again, and again, and again, and it feels so good and obscene and forbidden that you wish you knew his name so that you could scream it. 

He tightens his hold on your waist, and makes every effort to help you keep your balance as you fuck yourself on him. 

It doesn’t take long before your eyes squeeze shut and your mouth opens and a cry pours out of you like oil set on fire.

He holds you steady on him as you gasp and pant and clench and ride it out. 

It takes a long time. 

Your muscles gradually start to relax, and you eventually crack your eyes open, and your breathing rate finally descends back to normal and that’s when he starts it all back up again.

You groan and he ignores you and he presses small slow circles into your clit with the finger that was stationary on it and his tongue is moving again, it’s licking up inside of you. It’s lapping everywhere it can reach in a steady routine of up, down, and back around and curling, the tip is curling and pressing and his finger is rubbing you as if he couldn’t ever trust you fully to do the work correctly yourself so now he’s taking over to show you how it’s done. 

His rhythm is exquisite. 

Your eyes are squeezed shut and your face is grimacing and your muscles are rigid and there’s a fresh tainted fire building up inside of you and it’s going to consume you and all the water of all the oceans in the world won’t be able to put it out. His finger and tongue work out of sync on you and they don’t stop and don’t stop and don’t stop and don’t stop and now you think you’re screaming.

You come for a fourth time and your vision errors out. Tiny white stars pulse against the textured black of your eyelids and your breath is loud and jagged and your mouth is dry and your heart is stuttering and you want to drink. You want to rest. 

His tongue wiggles inside of you and you whine. He’s definitely grinning against you. You can feel the curve of his lips against your skin. His finger starts moving again.

You grip the ledge harder and try to pull yourself up and you don’t feel any resistance from him. He’s not trying to stop you. You pause for a second. And then you pull yourself up an inch and have no choice but to rest. You can’t catch your runaway breath. You can’t focus your trembling muscles. You can’t extinguish the heat that’s building up in the pit of your stomach that you cannot seem to kill. You can’t tell your body to stop betraying you and make it listen.

With a huge effort of will, you lift yourself further up the ledge. His tongue is still embedded in you. His finger is still making slow and perfect circles on you. His hand is still wrapped around your waist, supporting you as you raise yourself up but not helping you do so. He won’t let you fall but he won’t assist you in climbing higher. It’s up to you how far you want to climb or how deep you want to fall. It’s up to you if you want to stay where you are and put your life back on pause. 

Maybe he knows the struggle of tackling an insurmountable summit. Maybe he’s learnt the hard way that you only have yourself to rely on. Maybe he knows that the prize at the top isn’t really worth it, but the struggle and the victories and the attention from making the attempt are what really counts. 

Maybe he just wants to feel you squirm even harder upon his face.

Because that’s what you’re doing. You’re trying your hardest to scramble up to dry land and trying hard not to scream in frustration or pleasure and you’re failing on all three counts and he knows it, he knows it. He knows you. 

No.

He only thinks that he knows you. 

With a mighty heave that sends a white hot bolt of pain through every muscle in your arm, chest, and back, you lift your body clean of the water and flop onto the ledge and you don’t stop, you don’t dare stop to rest until you’ve pulled and scraped yourself along the ground away from the ledge as far as you can bear it and you keep going, the muscles in your body burning and you keep going, keep moving, until your body shuts down and you collapse from exhaustion. 

Cool rough stone presses into your cheek and you gasp shallow breaths as if you’re a dying fish that’s been sacrificed to the land. 

His tongue slithers out of you.

You clench your teeth and hiss as the long long length of it slides out of you. He’s been keeping pace with you. And only now is he breaking your connection. He takes his time doing so. And in turn gives you plenty of time to rejoice and mourn the loss of him.

The tip of his tongue finally leaves you, and you collapse back onto the ground for a second time. You hadn’t realised you’d been clenching your muscles so tightly and arching up as he was withdrawing. There’s a large hollow ache inside of you now that he’s gone. And at the bottom of this cavern that is your body, there are coals that are still glowing. They didn’t receive enough fuel to ignite and burn, and too little time has passed for them to die out. They want more. They want to burn. They want him. They want him back. You want him back.

You push that thought away and remind yourself that he hasn’t ever left you. Not since the first time you went swimming in the cove. He’s still here with you. Still only meters away from you.

He removes his finger from you. You’d forgotten that he still had it on you. 

You hear him push that finger into his mouth.

And only when you’ve raised your eyes and met his - only when you’ve looked into those red stars for more than a fleeting instant, does he suck it.

You close your eyes to him. He’s too much to take in. This is all too much to take in. Maybe it never happened. Maybe it isn’t happening. Maybe you’re floating half dead on a moonlit ocean and these are the final images your dying brain is glitching out before it implodes. None of this can be real. 

“Good, wasn’t it.” He does not ask you. He tells you.

He rests a hand on your waist and you tense up. He does not move it. He does not speak. He allows you to rest and recover and relax as much as you choose to. Which is disturbingly more than you would have liked. The air in the cavern is warm and soothing against your flushed wet skin. The gentle lapping of the water against the ledge beneath you is soothing to your ears. The feel of his hand on you is like a weighted blanket and is comforting to your heart. 

You swallow. And can’t bring yourself to open your eyes. You have always had a choice in everything in your life, and right now you’re choosing to do nothing. You’re so very tired. And content. And confused. And unsettled. But settled. 

His hand presses down into you gently, just a tiny increase of pressure. You know that he’s alerting you to his presence and reminding you that he’s still here. He’s still got you. He’s still waiting. 

“Tell me,” he drawls, as you feel his face move closer up to yours. He smells of warmth and age and magnificence. “What would you like to do now?” 

You feel both insignificant and invincible. 

Your heartbeat is hard and steady behind your ribs. Its faced uncharted trauma but has pulled you through and come out stronger. Your lungs inflate and deflate in your chest. They have a heavy hand upon them but they can take the weight. Your body’s muscles ache and pulse and feel electrified. They’ve been stretched and burnt but their exertions will make them stronger. 

Your resilience will make you stronger. 

You crack open an eyelid. 

You’ve made your decision. 

And you open your mouth to tell him.


	5. Hadopelagic [the hadal zone]

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Down in the Hadal Depths, in a dark and brilliant place, Starscream isn’t finished with you.
> 
> And you’re not finished with him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s the final part! Just like the last chapter, this one is explicit. Thank you to everyone who’s read this and stuck with it, I hope you’ve enjoyed it. It’s been a lot of fun to write, and I will be writing in this style again at some point as well as writing more merformers. 
> 
> I’m active over on tumblr and often post snippets of writing before I make them into fics that show up here my tumblr
> 
> And Thank You to shapeofmetal who drew more great art for this!! Ahhh look at it it's perfect, she draws the best things!
> 
> [tumblr link to fantastic art](shapeofmetal.tumblr.com)

“I would like…”  
  
You pause.  
  
He waits.  
  
He waits a while longer.  
  
You make him wait further.  
  
You hear the water ripple and splash and undulate as he moves, as he fidgets, as his impatience grows.   
  
You shouldn’t be teasing him like this. You shouldn’t be testing him. But you’re curious. He’s unlike anyone you’ve ever seen or met. His personality is alien yet shot through with threads of the familiar, and you want to see which ones float to the surface and unwravel if you continue doing what you’re doing.   
  
Which is nothing.  
  
The water of the night slaps softly against his skin. The waves thrown up by the deep dark are patient, but he is not.   
  
Like a searchlight set to shine a wavelength beyond your comprehension, you feel him smile in the dark.  
  
“Why certainly.”   
  
He answers your unspoken request simply and politely, and you feel a bolt of electricity in your stomach warning you that you shouldn’t have gone so far with this, you shouldn’t have started it at all.  
  
You open your eyes fully and find that his eyes are inches away from your face.  
  
You inhale in surprise, but you only manage a shallow inflation of your lungs because he’s put both hands on your waist and it’s stopped them. He’s frozen your lungs with his huge warm hands and now he’s dragging you back towards the ledge.   
  
He drags you back towards the ledge slowly, and gently. He is the deformed ocean that you know you shouldn’t swim in.  
  
You’re on your front, and this time you could grab onto the ground. You try to find handholds to arrest your capture and you find them easily, there are so many to choose from. You could hold onto a rock sticking out. You could dip your hand into a groove and tighten your fingers. You could try to hold on hard.  
  
He smiles wider. You can feel the tainted heat of it radiating onto your back. He continues to pull you carefully back towards the ledge, and you continue to catalogue and ignore the rocks that offer you a shard of hope that you’ll escape.  
  
…  
  
You were wrong.   
  
...  
  
He is patient.   
  
…  
  
You were very wrong.  
  
…  
  
You’ve always had a choice in this.  
  
…  
  
And now you’ve made it.  
  
...  
  
He kisses your neck softly. And drags you back over the lip of the ledge.  
  
Your feet are once again submerged in the water, and your upper body is supported by your arms on the ground in front of you. Except this time he’s also supporting you. He’s wrapped one arm around your front. But he’s not holding it still. He’s adjusting it, and making methodical movements to his arm’s position. He’s experimenting. He’s testing out something. He’s determining which is the best way to hold his arm to cushion you from the rough rock in front of you before he begins to move.  
  
Your blood cells swell and your heart rate rises.   
  
You know what’s coming next. You know what he’s going to do to you. There’s a thickness in the atmosphere you can taste and it’s all consuming. Your mouth is half open and you’re already panting.  
  
You tense. And you make a token effort to move. To escape. But he holds you easily in place. He didn’t try very hard to stop you, and that’s because you didn’t try very hard to escape. You should have. You really should have. But you didn’t.   
You could tell yourself it’s because you’re exhausted, and that any escape attempts will be futile. Except you don’t know that. You don’t know for certain that he would have prevented you from walking away. But you do know that you don’t want to face up to the stark truth of this. You know that you can lean on the duel crutches of mental and physical exhaustion for as long as you like.   
  
The hand that’s on your front begins to move. It begins to slowly stroke. He’s spent time on you and now it’s his turn, and since he’s given now it’s time to take. Your loose wetsuit rubs against you as he moves his hand over your chest, wet rubber against wet skin. He hooks the tip of a finger into the neck of your suit. He tugs it forward. You both know it can’t be removed like that, you both know he’s doing it on purpose.   
  
He runs his finger underneath the material of your suit along your neck like he’s tracing the outline of a necklace he wants to place there. Once his design is complete, he then moves his finger from your neck to your shoulder to your arm to your wrist. He helps you free your arm from your suit.   
  
He could easily rip it clean off you. He could carve lines into it with the precision he showed when he cut open his access to you from behind. But this way will take longer. This way will involve you helping him. This way will be more fun.  
  
Your force your arm to shed its second skin of rubber. He puts a fingertip onto the tip of your longest finger, and presses down onto it with the lightest of light pressures. His finger is the same width as two of yours, and is a colour you wouldn’t have guessed. He trails his finger back along your finger. Back along your hand. Back along your arm and up your shoulder and to your neck. He ignites a field of blistering nerves as he slowly moves it along you.   
  
You help him free your other arm.   
  
Your body should be shutting down in weary self-preservation by now, not gearing itself up for what’s to come. You can’t fight back against him and you can’t escape up onto the ledge. He’s too powerful and you’re too tired, tired from what your body’s been through and from how many times your head is calling you a liar.  
  
He rolls your wetsuit down your chest. And over your stomach. And down to your hips.   
  
Your entire upper body is now naked and exposed.   
  
He trails patterns onto it with his fingers, with his carefully controlled claws. They feel smooth and sure and precise and electrifyingly alien. Your skin’s voltage does not diminish and your body does not cool down. It’s burning hotter. It’s burning brighter. He writes a message on you in a language you cannot read but can clearly understand.  
  
His hands trail down you slowly. They grab onto the rolls of wet rubber around your hips and pull it down. Down past your thighs, your knees, your calves, your ankles, your feet.   
  
He throws the ruined suit away. From a far distance you hear a soft echoing splash as it hits the water.  
  
You are naked in the depths.  
  
This is not good.  
  
This is thrilling.   
  
This is inevitable.   
  
He puts both hands on your waist and adjusts his position behind you.  
  
You are heat and wet and skin and muscle and want, because you want this, because you don’t want this, because you want to not want this.   
  
He takes his time running his hands up and down your sides. Maybe he wants you to make a noise. To ask him for something. To plead with him for something. You bite down onto your lip and hold hard onto the ledge.  
  
He slides one hand down you, his fingers wrapping around your thigh and lacing easily back over each other. He spreads your leg apart.  
  
You bite down onto your lip harder.  
  
He snakes his other arm around around your front. It covers most of it, and will absorb the shock and friction of being rubbed up against the rock.  
  
You feel a warm firmness press up against your entrance.   
  
You close your eyes. And open them back up. You don’t know if it’s worse to imagine what’s about to happen or risk seeing flashes of it. Even though you’re facing forwards into a dim cave and can only see the edges of him behind you.  
  
He rises up into you.  
  
In one smooth movement he rises up and into you, like a sea serpent breaking the surface of its world without any further warning. You gasp and hold on tight as his dick slides into you. You’ve been well prepared and are wet, you’re still so very wet, but he’s not taking his time now, he’s already given you that.  
  
His dick is firmer than his tongue, but it’s just as warm. It’s just as wide. It’s just as swollen. He pushes more of it into you, one steady inch at a time, and you gasp louder and pant quicker as it fills you up. You take it easier than you would have liked. Your body’s been prepared for it, but so has your mind. So has your filthy traitorous mind. His grip on your thigh tightens, and as he takes you as he pleases, you can’t help but wonder if his dick is as long as his tongue is. You wonder which one is going to feel better once it hilts and starts moving inside you.  
  
You wonder if you could take both of them inside you at once.  
  
You lower your head and groan at that thought. You push down onto him. It’s inevitable.  
  
He thrusts up and doesn’t stop and doesn’t stop and he hilts inside you with a hiss that sounds like rain. You’re trying to catch your breath as you hold on tight to the ledge and work to adjust your body and your mind because it’s a lot, everything’s a lot, every single thing about him is a lot.  
  
He removes his hand from your thigh and places it on the ledge right next to yours. Your fingers brush against each other. He tightens his grip on the rock and grinds into you. You tighten your hand’s grip on the rock next to his, and make a low drawn out sound that could be pain or pleasure or fear or exaltation. There is no point in trying to stay quiet.   
  
He slides himself out and thrusts right back in. He isn’t fast and definitely not brutal, but he is remorseless. He’s wanted this for a long time, and now he’s finally getting it. Now he’s finally with you.   
  
He fucks you with an undeserved confidence and a silent ego that smirks as if it’s screaming. He knows that you want what he’s giving you, and knows that you don't want to admit it. He knows a lot about not admitting what someone really wants. Your two way communication is the slap of water and the grip of fingers. It’s low panting and fast breathing and you understand each other. You don’t want to but you do. He’s been in your head for so long already and now he’s here in person and you want this, you want to be right here.  
  
Right down here, inside this secret cave in the deadly hadal depths.   
  
In a cave lit only by unknown luminescence and the red pulsing of his electric eyes.  
  
You don’t know how big the cave is. You don’t know how far back it goes. You are a small speck in a world of darkness with a ledge of rock in front of you and an alien creature behind you. He holds you carefully as he fucks you, and cushions you to prevent you from being scraped raw against the rock.   
  
He presses his face into the back of your head and picks up his pace.  
  
You’re breathing deeply now, thick deep gulps of air in through your mouth and right back out of it. His dick slides out and presses in and grinds against you again and again and again and now you’re starting to see stars of your own creation, they’re flashing sodium white against your eyes.  
  
He’s got you angled perfectly so that you can’t escape or accidentally change position. He’s hitting all the spots inside you that have lain dormant, and now he’s claiming them as his own.   
  
He’s going to finish inside you, you know that he is. You moan lowly at that, a long drawn out sound that’s submerged by the sounds he’s making against your ear. His hands clench tightly on the rock and around your thigh and you grimace only slightly and not in pain as he thrusts up again, and again, and again. You’re being filled perfectly, and there’s something thrilling and forbidden about being dominated in the dark like this.  
  
You wonder if he’d stop if he knew you truly didn’t want this. You think he might. It wouldn’t be as much fun to dominate someone who was crying out loud for all the wrong reasons. He’s not a sadist. He’s an opportunist. A planner. He already knew you wanted this before he started.   
  
He wants to rule you. He wants to rule you, but only if you bend your knee to him without being shot in it.  
  
When he slides out of you he does so carefully. When he thrusts back inside you he does so smoothly. When your body shifts position he readjusts you, so that the next time his dick hits home it hits home perfectly and you press up and into his arm and he’s all you think about and all you feel.  
  
He wants to make you scream. He wants you to scream for him alone. That’s the challenge and the reward and that’s what he’s going to get from you, you know that’s what he needs.  
  
His arm around your chest tightens as he rises up into you. His breathing becomes more ragged as he rises up into you. His grip on the rock becomes more desperate as he rises up into you. He’s holding onto your harder, he doesn’t want to let you go. You’ve become his anchor in this storm of his own creation and it’s taking him unaware. He’s trembling and trying not to show it. He’s gritting his teeth and trying not to show it. He wants to go faster and harder but doesn’t want to ruin you, and is trying not to show you any of that.  
  
You put one hand over his.   
  
He thrusts up into you, and you dig your nails in hard.  
  
It doesn’t hurt him. You know it doesn’t hurt him.   
  
He pulls you into him closer, and he buries his face into your neck. You’re breathing fast and deep and making sounds without abandon, but your head is clear. Your thoughts are sharp and focused. He’s disintegrating behind you, and you like it. He’s groaning and trying to kiss your neck but can’t aim correctly as he moves in and out of you and you like it.   
  
You like that he’s coming undone.   
  
You stroke his fingers with a stutter.  
  
“I would like…” you try again to tell him what you want, and once again you come up short. Once again he reads your mind, and if he doesn’t find your words laid out in their correct order he’ll rearrange them for you.  
  
“I know,” he rasps, his hot wet mouth rubbing against your ear. “I know.”  
  
You don’t know how he knows, but you know that he does. He knows what you want.   
  
He doesn’t stop.   
  
You are molten inside - hot and wet and slick, and he doesn’t stop. He won’t ever stop. He’ll do this to you until the end of time, and this is how you’ll go. You’re stepping over a grid of criss-crossed lines in treacle thick slow motion without ever moving and you like it. It’s mind bendingly freeing and you like it. You’ve chosen to surrender some control here you’re sure that’s what you’ve done. And you like it. You like everything that’s happening.  
  
He’s drooling onto you. His desperate sounds have stopped and he’s drooling onto your neck, unable to spare the energy or intellect to formulate words and sounds and he’s been reduced, shrunk back to basic instincts as his world contracts and hardens to pure sensation.   
  
You stroke his hand again, slow and lazy, before you hold hard onto his fingers just because you can.  
  
You feel his open mouth stretch wider on your neck. You’re not worried that he’s going to bite you. This is the gasp of the desperate and the dying. Of the cursed and the neglected sentenced to something beautiful yet obscene.   
  
Every part of him tenses and tightens and he hisses and growls and cries and pleads and he doesn’t stop, he doesn’t stop, he doesn’t speed up and doesn’t slow down and doesn't stop and everything folds in on itself and constricts down to this one precise moment and he screams and you scream and there’s a flash of light that’s blinding.  
  
He finishes inside of you and he’s hot. He’s made you hotter and wetter and filled you further and it’s magnificent. You lower your head and groan, and try to think about how you’ll regain your balance. He lowers his head down alongside yours, and you know he’s thinking the same.  
  
He doesn’t move for a long time.  
  
You don’t move for a long time.   
  
You both don’t move for what seems like a very long time.  
  
You never once feel cold. You never once feel empty.   
  
Eventually he peels himself off of you.  
  
His claws, his hands, his arms, his chest, one thing after another detaches itself from you with careful precision. There is something underneath those movements though. There’s another mild flavour of thought. He nuzzles his face against yours, and you inhale the taste of his indecision.   
  
He’s deciding what to do with you.   
  
You wished you felt afraid.   
  
“This…” he starts to say but then stops. This could be one of hundreds of things. It could be one of thousands. The possibilities branching off here now outnumber the stars studded in the outside sky, and you know you cannot control them. You don’t have the power necessary to wield them.   
  
But you can try.  
  
You pull yourself up onto the ledge with a speed and ease that shocks you. He’s put up no resistance to your choice. You take your time standing up. You do not turn around. You are choosing what to see and the direction you want to travel in.   
  
You think hard about it.  
  
“Take me back,” you tell him.  
  
Water crawls down your body. It leaks into the warm rock your bare feet are standing upon. It begins the process of evaporating into the cave’s humid air. It takes the path of appropriate resistance.  
  
The water splashes softly behind you. You wonder if he’s left. You wonder if you’ve overstepped your bounds. You wonder why you’re not afraid of being left alone in the dark down here.  
  
You feel a familiar pressure around your waist. And then another. His hands take a careful hold of you, and he puts his imperfectly smooth mouth back up against your ear. He opens it, and you angle your head to hear him.  
  
“Don’t worry,” he says, his voice lazy and content but still sparking, still thrumming from what’s just happened and from knowing what you really want. “I’ve got you.”  
  
Before he can turn your face towards his, you do it yourself. You briefly see sharp elegant lines and soft sleek curves and the dark red simmering suns that threaten to open a gateway into his mind.  
  
He covers your mouth with his and pulls you back into the water.   
  
The ocean swallows you both cleanly.  
  
\--------  
  
The ascent back along the tunnels and up to the surface feels quick.  
  
It feels like no time at all is passing, despite how slowly you’re sure you’re travelling. He breathes for you and holds you flush against his chest and you don’t open your eyes. You don’t want to risk waking from this dream just to die from drowning.  
  
You only know you’ve breached the surface of the world when the sting of fresh air hits your wet skin.   
  
You don’t open your eyes. You don’t want to risk waking from this dream just to die from drowning.  
  
He holds you steady around your waist. And dips his head to press his mouth into your ear. The five words he whispers to you are what makes you open your eyes.  
  
You repeat them to yourself, and know that he isn’t lying.   
  
The hairs along the back of your skin erupt in icy fire.  
  
He inhales your scent and squeezes your waist and sinks down beneath the waves like a stealth torpedo primed for action. He doesn’t delay his departure. He doesn’t make a splash.  
  
The night air is cool and peaceful. The sky is the same colour as when you left it. The moon is the same size and brightness. It’s like you never descended at all. But you did. You know that you did. You don’t need to focus on the pleasant throbbing of your muscles, or the warm ache between your legs, or the lightness of your heart to know that it all happened.   
  
You roll over onto your back. And allow the waves to take you where they please. The night is cool and pleasant, and there’s nowhere you’re in a rush to be.   
  
The waves bring you back to shore. They carry you gently back to dry land as if you were an Emperor returning home after completing a voyage no-one thought you would survive.  
  
You look up at the stars and count them. There are many in the sky. And one on land. And one beneath the waves.  
  
You wonder what time it is. You wonder why you should care.  
  
You finally stand up. You curl your toes into the damp sand, and remember when they were curling underwater. Everything is so cool and wide up here.   
  
You walk back up the beach. You walk back up the path between the rocks. Below the unblinking observation of a bright full moon you ascend. With every step away from the water and every step away from him you ascend.   
  
You reach your car. It’s unlocked as usual, and you change into the spare clothes you always bring with you.   
  
You sit behind the wheel and turn the engine on. You don’t yet drive off. There is no rush. There has never been any rush. What’s in front of you isn’t your final destination.   
  
You turn your headlights on and start the drive back home.   
  
There’s a cool clear ringing in your ears that wasn’t there before.  
  
It’s the sound of crashing waves and lapping water and roaring rain. It’s the sound of a storm that you’ve created and it’s coming back to find you. It doesn’t hurt. This time the sounds of the deep don’t hurt you. This time the water seeping into your ears feels right. You close your eyes and feel the water settle, feel it find its state of balance. It feels warm. It feels good. You swim with it for a long time, and when you open your eyes back up you know that you’ve ascended. You’ve found your equilibrium. You’ve found your permanent source of oxygen to keep you breathing below the waves.   
  
You drive home underneath the moon’s bright spotlight. It’s another thing that doesn’t leave you. The cove becomes hidden once more as you turn a corner and head back into the world of concrete buildings and heavy gravity and wide open spaces.  
  
You replay the last five words he said to you.   
  
The words that answered your unfinished question of what you would like. The question that you've always known the answer to, but wanted his confirmation of.  
  
You smile a smile like steam rising from the water, soft and curled and lazily contented. It’s transformed from one state of matter to another, and now it’s finally free.  
  
“Don’t worry. This won’t end.”


End file.
